Danish producer Signe Byrge Sørensen talks to Japanese director Shiori Ito about the Oscar-shortlisted Black Box Diaries in which Ito embarks on a courageous investigation into her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
Sørensen opens the conversation by asking what drove her decision to share her story and “thereby take on the whole Japanese society on this issue of rape.”
“[At first] I wasn’t really thinking about making a film. I wasn’t really thinking about sharing to the world,” Ito responds. “I was filming myself before going public. So if something happened to myself, maybe my friends or family can find out what I have been facing. So it was almost for a protection reason.
“But then when I went public [and] asked to reopen my own rape case, there was a possible cover up. And I just realized how, in Japanese media, how it is still difficult to cover and talk about a sexual violence story. And more difficult when [there is] possible power involvement. So I realized that that’s something I might need to keep documenting, and possibly share in a documentary film which is my profession. And so it was like a slow decision.”
Sørensen further asks Ito, who is also a journalist, about the use of CCTV archive. “When I went to report the case to the police, the investigator told me that, unfortunately, rape happens a lot and they can’t do anything about it – and that was it.,” Ito responds. “But I told him I know which hotel I ran out from, so could you just at least check? Because I have no memory how I got there because usually CCTV is overwritten [after] a week or a month. So I was afraid that we are going to lose the evidence. So we went there, and we found the footage and he finally said ‘maybe, yeah, maybe this is a case.’”
Click on the link above to watch the entire conversation between Shiori Ito and Signe Byrge Sørensen.
