For its 30th birthday, Seven Days has partnered with the Vermont International Film Foundation to present Media in the Movies, a month of films celebrating journalists and their work. Starting on Friday, September 19, the weekly screenings include two fictional narratives, one documentary and one classic that straddles both. All screen at the Screening Room @ VTIFF at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington.
Black Box Diaries, which will close the series on Friday, October 10, at 7 p.m., is a Peabody Award-winning, Oscar-nominated 2024 documentary with a subject ripped from the headlines. It opens with a trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault from the director, Shiori Itô, who is also the main character.
The deal
“Black box.” That’s the term police investigators used for a slice of time that young journalist Itô couldn’t remember — the hours during which she allegedly was raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, then Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Tokyo Broadcasting System.
The police said they lacked sufficient evidence to arrest Yamaguchi, who was a close friend of then-prime minister Shinzo Abe. But in phone calls that Itô secretly recorded, an investigator who’d been removed from the case told her a higher-up had halted the proceedings.
Itô went public with her allegations in 2017, two years after the incident. Though her testimony coincided with the groundswell of the #MeToo movement, it defied long-standing cultural norms in Japan, where only 4 percent of rapes are reported, according to a government survey. “I had a problem with this norm,” Itô says in the film. To change it, she wrote a memoir and brought a civil suit against Yamaguchi.
Presented as an investigation combined with an informal video journal, Black Box Diaries chronicles how Itô faced online harassment, a countersuit and opposition to her openness even within her family. The documentary still has not screened in Japan, where Itô’s lawyers in the civil suit have accused her of using recordings in the film without permission.
Will you like it?
By her own admission in press notes, Itô was a “novice investigator” rather than a seasoned journalist when she made Black Box Diaries. The documentary portrays her sometimes-floundering efforts to build a case by ambushing the police chief and recording her conversations with the chatty “Investigator A,” who supplied much of the evidence for a cover-up. In one scene, when she asks him to go on record, he jokes that he’d be happy to — if she’ll marry him.
This isn’t textbook journalism. In another scene, when Itô consults with veteran reporters, they tell her that a victim should only investigate her own case as a “last resort.” But I suspect many journalists can relate to the tricky interview situation described above, in which Itô gamely builds a rapport with her flirtatious source while promising nothing.
This reporter is learning on the job, and her real-time, immersive narrative (without narration or talking-head commentary) offers plenty of drama. Aided by Swedish filmmaker Hanna Aqvilin (who produced) and videographer friends, Itô pairs footage of Tokyo with audio of revealing conversations with the police, lawyers and her family. In her self-filmed video confessionals, she makes no pretense of neutrality, instead capturing her turbulent emotions on camera — including a tearful message to her parents during a mental health crisis.
Itô’s critics accuse her of seeking personal fame, and the documentary has only heightened those accusations. But rape is a very personal crime, and bringing perpetrators to justice almost always requires the painful testimony of survivors. By taking center stage in her memoir and Black Box Diaries, Itô used her experiences as a wedge to budge antiquated laws that made sexual assault almost impossible to prosecute. Her efforts had some success, but at a price.
In one telling scene in the film, Itô bonds with a group of street protesters, elder feminists who support her cause. It’s a positive interaction. But after she leaves, the women point her out to a friend as “the girl who was raped.”
In public shorthand, the crime has become Itô’s identity, the attention economy robbing her of her humanity just as the rape did. (“To him, I was just a small object,” Itô says of Yamaguchi in her courtroom testimony.) Black Box Diaries is a riveting effort to take back her personhood.
If you like this, try…
His Girl Friday (Friday, September 19, 7 p.m., Screening Room @ VTIFF, Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center, in Burlington): The Media in the Movies series kicks off with Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball comedy, in which Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell play newshounds who also happen to be exes. Many of our clichés of hard-boiled journalists — such as fast-talking unflappability — started here.
Medium Cool (Friday, September 26, 7 p.m., Screening Room @ VTIFF): For this all-too-relevant film from 1969, director Haskell Wexler wove together real footage of police violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention with the fictional story of a journalist to create what New York Times critic Vincent Canby called “a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.”
This article appears in 30th Birthday Issue.
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