CPH:DOX 2024 – Black Box Diaries

Shiori Ito is a brave woman with big ambitions. As a journalist, she covers the Washington beat for one of Japan’s biggest newspapers, but when her older boss sexually assaults her after a night out, everything changes. Where many others in the patriarchal Japanese culture would shrug off the assault and turn the trauma inward, she chooses to launch a year-long investigation that ends in a high-profile trial. But opposition from all sides is fierce, and it becomes a tough and gruelling battle for Shiori. Her boss – a close friend of the president – represents an entire system that is hierarchical in a way that is very different from what we know in the West, and the laws have not been updated in over a hundred years. But Shiori also gets help from unexpected quarters, and in two scenes where good people support her simply because it’s the right thing to do, you can’t help but share her emotions. The film is Shiori’s diary of an unimaginably hard and lonely struggle to improve women’s rights and bring a conservative culture into the 21st century.