Even for someone who lived the events she was documenting, filmmaker Shiori Itō could’ve constructed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Black Box Diaries” many ways. The Japanese journalist was sexually assaulted in 2015 and wrote a 2017 memoir about her attempt to prosecute the perpetrator, working from records and recordings she kept at the time. Armed with an iPhone, she also began filming.
But “Black Box Diaries” isn’t just confessional videos into a phone camera; the project was a grueling process of years for Itō and her collaborators to give the film the eventual shape of the MTV documentary. Itō tried everything, from stop motion animation to a heist-like recreation where she booked the same hotel room where she’d been assaulted (under a friend’s name) and smuggled in the life-size body doll that police once made her use to re-enact her assault for them to judge whether to prosecute her case.
“It was always trial and error to find the ways to exhibit my emotions,” Itō told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “How do we make the diary into visuals? That was always the biggest question.”
Itō and her collaborators answer that question from multiple angles. “Black Box Diaries” contains filmed conversations between the filmmaker and her friends as she goes public with her case and prepares her memoir. The film also weaves interviews and attempted interviews with Japanese officials, and meetings she had before and after the release of her book. Some of these elements remain controversial, as “Black Box Diaries” has yet to find distribution in Japan and some Japanese lawyers have raised concerns about the film using security camera footage and recordings of private calls without the appropriate permissions.
But the documentary also features lyrical, experiential visuals of Tokyo — curtains gently blowing in the damp air or the weirdly enticing geometric patterns that street lights make when you’re driving late at night. Itō wanted to visually place the audience where she was looking at the time, in a way that conveyed the disorientation and stress she was feeling. So there are built-in moments that pause to take in a landscape, even one as urban as Tokyo.
“[I tried] to remember where I was writing that diary, what I was seeing,” Itō said. “I decided to bring these small cameras to film through my own eyes, and that’s how we [wanted] to portray Japanese society without saying too much.”
It took four years for Itō and her editor, Ema Ryan Yamazaki, to refine what the film does and doesn’t say. First, Yamazaki needed to bring down the mountain of over 400 hours of footage and 50 hours of audio recording into a digestible 10 hours that she and Itō could work through together.
Itō initially didn’t want any of those 10 hours to show her talking to the camera, but she eventually came around to the film offering a more personal perspective than journalism could.
“What we wanted to do with this film was [portray] this real captured moment. But it was so hard because I didn’t feel right about putting my voice from today [out there] — because I’m so different. I’m such a different person today, [including] when I was editing,” Itō said.
While meticulously going through footage and audio related to her own trauma, Itō found that some of those four years of post-production had to involve naps.
“When I was editing with Ema, I [would often] fall asleep, because that was, somehow, how I handled my trauma. I shut down, and I fall asleep,” Itō said. “So we started having this little couch [where] we were editing. But the interesting thing is that once we were almost [finished with] the editing, I didn’t fall asleep anymore. I could handle it. And when I could watch the whole film, the full film, without sleeping, that was the sign. ‘All right. This sits with me.’”
“Black Box Diaries” is available to stream on Paramount+.
