Speaking With Shiori Ito: How the Journalist Used Storytelling to Confront Her Sexual Abuse
Doc Weekly is covering this year’s BFI London Film Festival with reviews and interviews from some of our favourite documentaries. Our writer Ellie Malpas interviewed Shiori Itō , director of Black Box Diaries, which comes out in UK cinemas today, the 25th of October 2024.
In 2015 journalist Shiori Ito was drugged and raped by Noriyuki Yamaguchi in his hotel room. Since then she has used her story to dismantle stigma around sexual abuse, change the legal system in Japan, and demand justice for other survivors. Her directorial debut Black Box Diaries: a deeply personal documentation of her battle, comes to UK cinemas on the 25th of October, 7 years after her memoir of the same name.
I spoke to Shiori the day before its screening at the BFI London Film festival. My first ever interview, I was nervous, but the disarming and warm personality I had seen in the film was evident straight away.
Sitting down looking over the city, she told me how busy she has been. This stop in London is one of many international visits as she tours the film across Europe. Revisiting such a traumatic event in her life over and over is challenging, but Shiori describes the documentary process like “making a big family” compared to the more isolating nature of her memoir.
We witness every emotion as Shiori navigates her trial, from ecstatic highs to tear jerking lows, with plenty of laughs along the way. It’s a conscious departure from the stereotypical portrayal of victims that we’re used to seeing: “right after I went to the police they said I was hard to take seriously because I wasn’t crying enough. When I was doing press, journalists would tell me what to wear. I felt there was a mindset that certain victims are easier to believe”.
It’s an authenticity that can only really be achieved with a first person perspective: “I could do it because it’s my life, I wanted to show all of it and break the norm”. When it comes to labels, she takes comfort in the fact that there is no point fighting for control in what others call her, only how she refers to herself “I use survivor a lot, but that doesn’t feel quite right because my struggle isn’t past tense, everyday I am surviving”.
In the film, vlogs are stitched together with newsreels, CCTV footage, and daily scenes of Japan. Tranquil shots of the cherry blossom, or of people walking by windows, situate us firmly in Ito’s shoes “whenever I took a phone call during the trial I would focus on my view and film as much of it as I could”. We hear many of these phone calls, with family members or police investigators, played out in full. Stylistically Shiori was inspired in particular by other film memoirs like For Sama and Strong Island, and Black Box Diaries feels similar in its unique ability to find clarity in more complicated contextual elements whilst remaining deeply personal.
So far, a lot has changed thanks to Shiori Ito. Her work has overturned the century old law that defined rape only when violence could be proven, she has been named the face of Japan’s #metoomovement and has even made the Times 100 most influential people list. And since the release of Black Box Diaires, the IDA (International Documentary Association) has already named her Emerging Filmmaker of the year.
After 9 long years she now hopes to hand the baton over: “my job as a storyteller is done. It’s down to the audience now to use whatever power they have to act in some way, maybe even tell their own story”.
Black Box Diaries will is out in UK cinemas from today, the 25th of October 2024 !
