Movie: Black Box Diaries
Running Time: 1:43
Nominated for: Documentary Feature
How I watched: Prime
When it had me: Right Away
When it lost me: a little around meetings with lawyers
What systems does it challenge: Patriarchy, Rape Culture
This is a super brave film made by a journalist and victim of sexual assault in Japan. I wonder who will watch it? Most men I know are not comfortable watching a woman work through her sexual assault aftermath on film and half of the women I know would be too triggered by this film to get through it. (Loads of triggers! She even acknowledges it in the opening of the film.)
Shiori Ito is SO HUMAN in this piece. That's my biggest takeaway. And she shares all of it with us. The disassociating, the trauma naps, the fear and uncertainty. The break downs that happen when someone is kind to you - oh, that one is so familiar! The laughter about how absurd everything has become. The desire to doggedly pursue justice and the hesitance to reveal something damaging to others.
Her rapist happened to be the biographer for the Prime Minister of Japan so he had so much protection and she didn't have a chance. However, I've looked it up and since the film came out, Japan is now changing its laws surrounding sexual assault, raising the age of consent and establishing wider parameters for establishing consent. So, what a warrior! She had to bare her soul and leave her home country while enduring eight years of battle but she has brought change that will help everyone in Japan (except the rapists).
Thank you, Shiori.
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