MTV documentary Films has acquired U.S. rights to Shiori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries.”
The docu, about the investigation of the director’s own alleged sexual assault, debuted in the World Cinema documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and has been an audience favorite at this year’s CPH:DOX, South by Southwest and Hot Docs film festivals.
MTV will theatrically release “Black Box Diaries” this fall, beginning in October at New York’s Film Forum. The film will be qualified for awards consideration before streaming on Paramount+ for subscribers with the Showtime plan later this year. Last year, the division released two Oscar nominated docs — Maite Alberdi’s feature length “The Eternal Memory” and Sheila Nevin’s short titled “The ABCs of Book Banning.”
Ito’s 103-minute film tracks her arduous, five-year struggle to bring to justice renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi for allegedly sexually assaulting her in 2015, when she was a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters. She went out for a drink with Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and end up in his hotel room.
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In 2017, Ito’s memoir about the alleged rape, titled “Black Box,” was published and went on to win the Free Press Assn. of Japan Award for Best Journalism in 2018 and is currently available in 11 languages. When prosecutors declined to press charges against Yamaguchi, Ito pursued a civil case against him, winning damages in 2019. For her contribution to Japan’s #MeToo movement, Ito was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2020.
The book was followed by “Black Box Diaries,” Ito’s feature documentary debut. The docu combines secret investigative recordings, vérité footage and emotional first-person video to tell her story, which would become a landmark case in Japan.
“We were awestruck by this film and couldn’t take our eyes off the screen, anxiously awaiting how it was all going to play out with so many twists and turns. Shiori is a marvel – enrapturing audiences from the first frame – whose bravery is an absolute wonder knowing the risks involved in sharing her story,” MTV documentary Films co-head Nina L. Diaz and Liza Burnett Fefferman said in a joint statement.
PvNew’s Guy Lodgepraised thefilm,writingin hisreviewout of Sundance that Ito’s “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.”
By going public in May 2017 with her rape allegations, Ito helped change Japan’s antiquated sexual assault laws. Last year, the country raised the age of consent from 13 to 16, and in 2017 men were allowed to report allegations of rape.
“It means so much to me to work with MTV documentary Films on the release of ‘Black Box Diaries’ and support us to get this story out to the world,” says Ito. “This wasn’t an easy story for me to tell, but it is my responsibility as a journalist to tell the truth and I hope it inspires others to use their own voices to create change.”
Ana Vicente of Dogwoof negotiated the sale with MTV documentary Films on behalf of the filmmakers with Lance McPherson on behalf of the distributor.
