In her debut documentary feature, which premiered at Sundance, the journalist Shiori Ito chronicles her journey for legal recourse in a case against the high-profile reporter she accused of rape.

There’s a scene in Shiori Ito’s searing documentary Black Box Diaries, in which the director, who is also the film’s subject, tells a swarm of reporters about trying to press criminal charges against her rapist. Like many sexual violence survivors forced into this ritual of public re-litigation, she is a model of what society has come to expect of courageous women. Her face betrays no emotion and she is dressed in the chaste uniform of the aggrieved: delicate earrings (Ito opts for pearls), a conservatively tailored blouse (a black button down here), and wearing little to no makeup (faint signs of blush and a single stroke of eyeliner).

After a couple of months, the authorities abandoned Ito’s case and the young woman, a journalist in her own right, decided to go public. She held the aforementioned press conference in May 2017 and published a memoir five months later.

Black Box Diaries, which opened Oct. 25 in the U.S., chronicles Ito’s attempts to procure legal redress. With its combination of diaristic iPhone videos, news reports, hotel security footage from the night of Ito’s rape and various audio recordings, the film is a visceral testimony of survival and recourse. 

In its devastation and familiarity, Ito’s debut feature finds company among works that realize the power of survivor testimony.

An obvious one that comes to mind is She Said, Maria Schrader’s conventional dramatization of New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s investigation of Harvey Weinstein. Schrader deployed testimony in a striking way, using the actual recording of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s encounter with Weinstein to shift the film’s perspective and jolt viewers out of the comforting lull of fictionalized narratives.

A more recent work is director Lee Sunday Evans and actress Elizabeth Marvel’s sobering play The Ford/Hill Project at New York’s Public Theater. That production, which recently ended its run, interpolates the hearings of both Anita Hill, who went before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 to testify against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who sexually harassed her, and Christine Blasey Ford, who went before the same committee in 2018 after accusing then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in high school.

The material power of the accused — conferred by a society more likely to side with perpetrators than survivors of assault — connects these works, which span different countries and years. Together, these women’s stories form an imposing chorus of damning disclosures, speaking to the difficulty survivors face when trying to tell the truth. 

Most people in Ito’s life begged her not to go public. Conversations with her family and one of the investigators in the aborted criminal case, some of which are included in Black Box Diaries, reveal the depths of fear that nurture a culture of silence in Japan. These people are concerned about losing their jobs, tarnishing their reputations and the threat of violence that might come from Ito subjecting herself to an unsparing public.