Black Box Diaries

Shiori Itō became the public face of Japan's #MeToo movement almost against her will: a journalist in her twenties who reported an assault by a prominent television correspondent with close ties to the Abe government, watched the criminal case evaporate, and then held a press conference about it. Black Box Diaries is her account of the years that followed, and it went from Sundance to an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

She began recording because she expected to need evidence. The film is built from that material: phone calls with investigators, hotel security footage obtained after a long fight, voice memos recorded in the middle of the night, conversations with the one detective willing to talk. Itō appears throughout, sometimes composed for the cameras outside a courthouse and sometimes not composed at all, and the film is unusually honest about the physical cost of conducting a legal campaign and a documentary shoot about your own assault at the same time.

It also functions as a portrait of an institutional culture — a prosecution service, a press club system, a set of assumptions about what a complainant should look like. The film's release in Japan was delayed and contested, and Itō's own former lawyers publicly objected to her use of some material, a dispute the film's supporters and critics have both had to reckon with. It remains the most significant documentary yet made about the Japanese legal system's treatment of sexual violence.