‘Black Box Diaries’: Sundance Review

Dir. Shiori Ito. Japan. 2024. 102mins

Black Box Diaries is ostensibly an on-the-hoof, shot-by-phone film of the moment in a young woman’s life when she decides to name her rapist – and all the moments which follow, in which she comes perilously close to losing that life completely. Shiori Ito, an aspiring journalist who brought #MeToo to Japan and paid the price, asks us to follow her journey in what feels like real time.

One of the discoveries of this year’s Sundance film festival

At the time of Ito’s assault in 2015, the age of consent in Japan was 13 – yet non-consent was not grounds for rape. These archaic rules, which only changed last year, meant her assailant could insist he never broke the law. Over five long years, from the age of 27 to 33, Ito went public and pursued her attacker, the powerful journalist Noriyuki Yamaguchi; the closest reporter to Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and the author of his biography. She only named him, and herself, after his arrest at Narita Airport was suddenly, mysteriously, abandoned.

With its appealing and very-now mix of forensic journalism with the high-and-lows of instant iPhone reactions and emotions, Black Box Diaries is a natural festival film as well as being a pulverising illustration of truth and its consequences. Premiering in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary section, it is a sister film to that festival’s On The Record (2020), which highlighted abuses in the hip-hop industry through the experience of former executive Drew Dixon, who also named her abuser (as Russell Simmons). That got as cautious a welcome as Shiori Ito did in Japan back in 2017, when she started her public pursuit, but Dixon survived Oprah Winfrey dropping her executive producer credit to see her documentary become a landmark film. Black Box Diaries will undoubtedly do the same.

Ito’s experience is, at least, in the past. The case has closed and she has written her book, Black Box. Her film is the final statement and relates the story from start to finish. We see the very beginning, in shaky black-and-white streetcam footage of her being pulled out of a taxi, unable to stand, and pulled across a hotel lobby. A taxi driver testifies she was insensible, yet insistent she didn’t want to go to Yamaguchi’s hotel.

The word ‘brave’ is a much bandied-about term for women who go public like Ito – in Japan, she stood alone, and was pilloried as a result. Black Box Diaries shows the personal consequences of her need to fight for justice, making the extent of her bravery something that can only really be discussed in hindsight. She doesn’t know, after all, when she switches the camera on herself, what will happen next. At one point, she writes letters saying that if she is found dead, it will not be through suicide but some unspecified dark deed by Government agencies. Later, she does attempt suicide, about as low as a hostile Japanese public can drag her, with the events of that night still raging through her mind.

Black Box Diaries is an unusual film and not just because it comes from Japan, perceived as a more ‘traditional’ society. There are elements which are unexpected. Ito doesn’t bother to burnish her credentials, her various internships at prestigious journalistic outlets, her placements in America, or even her decidedly lower middle-class upbringing. She doesn’t re-stage the night: she can’t remember it, having woken up in the bedroom with Yamaguchi on top of her. She starts the camera on a single young woman taking on the world: the police have dropped her case and they are in the wrong. Her family doesn’t want her to do this but there’s a naivety, reflected in some brilliant editing of very raw footage by Ema Ryan Yamakazi, even a relief in going public. There: her secret is out. What can be worse?

The film is at its most fascinating in the details that Yamakazi sees in the edit. Ito’s modern gumption versus her deference as a Japanese woman, extreme to outsiders. Her bravado, her lack of understanding, which comes so painfully, that there is no righting this wrong. Would she do it all again? It’s not even a question for her to answer: her path was her path, and Black Box Diaries shows her doggedly following it.

Clip-able and extract-able and showable across all media formats, Black Box Diaries is one of the discoveries of this year’s Sundance film festival: it seems to encapsulate a generation’s dreams and disappointments, torments and triumphs. Even if it takes place on the other side of the world, it’s still a story we all know when we see it.