Shiori Ito documents her fight to have the sexual assault on which she says he was the victim by a man close to the Prime Minister.
In 2015, Japanese journalist Shiori Ito was raped by chemical submission by one of her colleagues, who is also the biographer and one of the relatives of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, then in office. Quickly, the investigation was abandoned by the authorities (the arrest of the man she accuses is even canceled at the last minute). But Shiori Ito decides to continue his fight on the media and public scene so that the truth bursts.
This fight gave rise to Black Box Diaries,, documentary Shot over eight years, released in theaters this Wednesday, March 12, 2025. The journalist recounts the advances of the case, her ostracization by the Japanese society, his doubts, the new revelations, to the trial.
One of the first interests of the documentary is first of all formal: it is rare that the director of a documentary is also the subject of the film. Between factual investigation, where Shiori Ito retraces the advances in her business, but also an overwhelming diary, where she sometimes confides in front of her doubts, her sufferings, and her victories, Black Box Diaries is a striking hybrid work.
Diving in Japanese society
But it is obviously basically that Black Box Diaries turns out to be remarkable: by describing the details of this case of sexual violence, the film quickly exceeds its subject to denounce the flaws of the Japanese media-judicial company. Insults and threats, corruption, well anchored patriarchy, restrictive laws … It is a portrait of the Japan Where the Metoo movement has not yet really emerged that this documentary draws without artifice or concession.
Black Box Diaries was appointed to the Oscar for the best 2025 documentary, a first for Japanese production. On the other hand, the feature film does not find a distributor in his country. Shiori Ito is criticized for having used clandestine recordings to document your fight, explaining that she was opposing to “a powerful man”. An online petition was created for the film to be broadcast in Japanese rooms.
Synopsis – Since 2015, Shiori Ito has challenged the archaisms of Japanese society following his sexual assault by a powerful man, close to the Prime Minister. Alone against all and confronted with the faults of the media-judicial system, the journalist leads her own investigation, ready to everything to break the silence and make the truth burst …