Director: Shiori Ito

Investigative journalist turned director Shiro Ito takes audiences through her painstaking efforts to bring to light her sexual assault at the hands of a media executive in this harrowing but vital documentary. In 2015 Ito, then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters, had a post-meeting drink with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a high-ranking news executive of the Tokyo Broadcasting system/ TV reporter, as well as, it is revealed, a friend of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Harrowing video footage of the incident shows the near unconscious Ito being dragged out of the car. Due to the law, since changed, the authorities did not regard victim non-consent as a proof of perpetrator guilt. In 2018, Ito publishes the book ‘Black Box’, a memoir of her experiences as well as a plea to review the law. We follow Ito’s investigation, via straight to phone accounts and news footage, as she sees her case initially thrown out, before taking it to civil court, as well as her attempts to recruit allies male allies, some who react honourably such as the remorseful doorman who witnessed her being led into building; others, like a journalist who supplies her with a quote then asks her out, less so. It’s a righteous and genuinely alarming expose of seemingly untouchable elites and despite the documentary format, the picture, with its numerous shots of looming impersonal grey buildings and blandly corporate interiors sports the look of a 70s conspiracy thriller.

David Willoughby

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