‘Black Box Diaries’ Review: Shiori Ito’s Courageously Candid Documentary Account of Her Own #MeToo Battle
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Amid the surfeit of films about women’s rights and men’s abuses of power that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, we haven’t yet seen one quite like “Black Box Diaries.” A tightly wound, heart-on-sleeve procedural documentary, Shiori Ito‘s directorial debut identifies a world of systemic iniquities through the prism of a single, long labored-over case of sexual assault — crucially, the director’s own.
That raw first-person perspective, untempered by the interests of another filmmaker and given narrative rigor by Ito’s substantial journalistic skills, makes “Black Box Diaries” not just a damning analysis of patriarchal power structures in contemporary Japan, but a vivid evocation of the day-to-day psychological swings and breaks that come with living as a survivor.
The title’s allusion to diary-keeping is on point: Ito’s vulnerabilities can be discomfiting to witness, even with her consent.
A standout of the World Cinema Documentary competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “Black Box Diaries” is presented as Ito’s final word on an ordeal already covered in her 2017 memoir — though there has been significant legal progress on the case since its publication — and granted enough international media attention to secure her a place on 2020’s Time 100 list.
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