Black Box Diaries (Movie)

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    Why Japanese Oscar Contender ‘Black Box Diaries’ Isn’t Being Shown in Japan

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    Shiori Ito’s searing indictment of Japan’s justice system in handling sexual assault cases is nominated for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.A film by a Japanese woman about her search for justice from uncooperative authorities after she reported being raped is a contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Yet, despite being the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar, the movie cannot be seen in her home country.In the film, “Black Box Diaries,” the journalist Shiori Ito tells the story of what happened to her after she reported being raped at a hotel by a prominent television journalist and the ordeal she says she experienced with Japan’s justice system.The film, which is up for best documentary feature, premiered in January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival. It was released in U.S. theaters in October and can currently be seen or is slated to be shown in over 30 countries. However, those do not include Japan.The Japanese subsidiary of a major streaming service declined to distribute the film in early 2024, the filmmakers said, and theaters have so far displayed little interest in showing it. The prospects for the film’s release grew even murkier in October when Ms. Ito’s former lawyers and other previous supporters, including fellow journalists, spoke up against her, saying she had used footage without the consent of people in it.Ms. Ito with the producers of “Black Box Diaries,” Hannah Aqvilin and Eric Nyari, at the Oscars nominees dinner in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThis is not the first time that Japan has balked at showing unflattering films that were well received in Hollywood. “The Cove,” a documentary about a dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, and “Unbroken,” a feature film about cruel treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II, both opened at least a year after their U.S. premieres. “The Cove,” which was made by an American director, won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2010.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Guide to the Documentary Oscar Nominees

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      A quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.Since the best documentary feature category was first established at the Oscars in 1942, the nominees have been like a snapshot of the year: wars and social concerns, heroes and headlines. This year is no exception. On paper, each of the five nominees look as if they’re ripped from the headlines, chosen for some metric like “urgency” or “timeliness.”But these are no ordinary documentaries. In the past decade, the Academy has gotten much better about nominating nonfiction films that stretch and push at their boundaries, challenging audiences in how they convey their subject matter. Most opt to confront world events through intensely personal stories, and all of them carefully show why their individual stories have far-reaching implications.So, as the 2025 Oscars are upon us, here’s a quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.With “Black Box Diaries” (streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime), the director Shitori Ito takes a courageously personal approach to her biting critique of the handling of sexual assault cases in Japan. In 2017, Ito held a news conference to announce allegations that a prominent Japanese journalist had raped her. In the documentary, she chronicles the fallout of that accusation. The film is both intimate and enraging. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review, it’s “a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter.”My colleagues and I have written about “No Other Land” (in select theaters) a lot during the past year. It’s probably the most acclaimed documentary of the year, centering on the lives of families who have witnessed their homes, in the occupied West Bank region of Masafer Yatta, be demolished over and over again. Despite its obviously timely story and a directorial team of two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers, it hasn’t been able to secure a distribution deal in the United States, which is why it isn’t available to stream here. If you can see it in a theater, don’t overlook how well it’s made, mixing home video archives, journalistic footage and conversations between the filmmakers to powerful effect.“Porcelain War” (in select theaters) has picked up a raft of awards from guilds and critics this season. It, too, looks through the lens of the personal to tell an urgent story — this one about the war in Ukraine. The film centers on Slava Leontyev, who directed the film with Brendan Bellomo, and who is a ceramist as well as a member of a Ukrainian special forces unit. Art and warfare blend in the film, which melds GoPro footage from the battlefield with looks at Leontyev’s work, finally landing on a hopeful note about the value of beauty in darkness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Black Box Diaries’ Review: A Public Face for #MeToo in Japan

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      In a new documentary, Shiori Ito recounts her yearslong crusade for justice in Japan after accusing a powerful journalist of rape.Not everyone gets to be the heroine of her own story, much less a champion for others. On May 29, 2017, a 28-year-old Japanese journalist, Shiori Ito, did just that when she announced at a news conference that she had been raped in a Tokyo hotel two years earlier by a powerfully connected journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi. (He has denied the allegation.) Ito had decided to speak her truth despite intense pressure to remain silent. “People need to know about the horrors of rape,” she told a room of reporters, “and how deeply it affects one’s life.”Undaunted, Ito talks openly throughout “Black Box Diaries,” her moving if sometimes frustrating documentary about how she became a public face of the #MeToo movement in Japan, all while she grappled with police obstructionism, misogynist laws, sexist vitriol and fears about her safety. Going public was gutsy, and unusual. “One of the first things many Japanese women do while still shivering and bleeding at home is to read online about the experience of others — and deciding it’s just not worth pursuing,” David McNeill, an editor at Asia Pacific Journal, wrote in an interview he did with Ito after her first news conference.At the time, to protect her privacy, Ito wasn’t using her surname; not everyone in her family wanted her to speak out. Yet she soon went fully public, and her name became headline news. It remained so as she continued to seek justice in a fight that — as one year turned into another — grew into a cause, eventually becoming part of a national reckoning on sexual violence and harassment. With friends and lawyers, and buoyed by allies and sympathetic strangers, Ito fought to transform Japan’s laws and ideas relating to sexual violence. (In 2023, Japan criminalized nonconsenual sexual acts; in 2019, the United Nations had issued a statement saying the “absence of consent” should be the global definition of rape.)The documentary, based on her 2017 memoir, “Black Box,” is a chronicle of Ito’s ordeal and her fight. As the title suggests — a prosecutor, Ito has explained, called her case a “black box” because it happened behind closed doors — there’s a confessional aspect to her project. The documentary, for one, opens with some first-person statements styled as handwriting, the words running over an image of flowing water. “Please be mindful of the triggers in this film,” it reads, as cherry blossoms drift across the screen. “Close your eyes and take a deep breath if you need to.” As water and petals flow, so do her words: “That has helped me many times.”What follows is effectively a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter. In 2015, following the assault and after she filed a criminal complaint with the police department, Ito realized that she had to become her own advocate. She began chronicling the investigation in secret audio recordings, detailed written records and videos. After prosecutors dropped the case, despite DNA evidence and testimony from a taxi driver who dropped her at the hotel — she decided to take her personal investigation to the world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More