Black Box Diaries review | A singularly brilliant act of journalism

black box diaries review
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A young journalist documents her fight to bring her assailant to justice in one of the most powerful documentaries of the year. Here’s our Black Box Diaries review.


As Black Box Diaries opens, CCTV footage shows a man dragging a semi-conscious woman from a car into a hotel. The car is a taxi; the driver does nothing. The hotel is high-end; a man holds the door open for them. The woman is the film’s director, Shiori Itō; in 2015, she was a trainee journalist seeking career advice from Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a friend of then–prime minister Shinzo Abe. Yamaguchi drugged her, took her into the hotel, and raped her.

In a country whose sexual assault legislation was written more than a century earlier, and with an age of consent as low as 13 years old, the #MeToo movement would prove, if anything, more seismic than in the West. Facing down absurd levels of media scrutiny, establishment pressure and the advice of her own family, Itō’s campaign for justice became a 2017 memoir, Black Box, and ushered in a sea change in Japan. Nearly a decade on from the crime that started it all, her self-directed documentary feels as urgent and timely as ever.

Every once in a while, the documentary space emerges with a film that makes you stop and wonder: how the hell did they do that? On a technical level, Black Box Diaries is a thrilling, watching-through-your-fingers tale of exceptional journalism. There’s something of All The President’s Men about the scrappy, shoe leather presentation, combining news footage, to-camera pieces and surreptitious filming from the backseat of a car.

But even more impressive than the technical feat here is the emotional one. Itō interviews people intimately involved in the most traumatic episode of her life with the dispassionate curiosity of a presenter asking about voter intention. When national media accuses her of dressing provocatively at a press conference (her top button was undone), we watch her laugh it off on her sofa. Itō is a remarkably engaging screen presence in her own right – that she does so while grappling with the immense pressure of being at the centre of a media frenzy is little short of astonishing.

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Tonally, Black Box Diaries walks a delicate tightrope. Though the subject matter is, of course, a heavy one, and there’s no shortage of emotional gut-punches, there’s a lightness and an optimism that makes it far from the bleak, ‘worthy’ offering it could seem from a synopsis alone. Instead, the film at times plays out like a fist-pumping underdog story. Part legal drama, part love-letter to the act (if not the industry) of journalism, this is a remarkably assured cinematic debut, and an undeniably powerful crowd-pleaser all at once. Black Box Diaries is hands-down one of the best documentaries of the year; I have no idea how they did it.

Black Box Diaries arrives in cinemas from 25th October.

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