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Production
2022

Black Box Diaries


  • Shiori Ito, Director
  • Eric Nyari, Producer
  • Hanna Aqvilin, Producer

Film still of a pensive Shiori under an umbrella, face in hand

About the Project

Synopsis

From confessional-style iPhone and secret recordings mixed with verite shooting, a staggering account of Shiori's Ito's improbable fight as both victim and journalist against Japan's antiquated rape laws and institutions.


Shiori Ito, Director

Shiori Ito is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Her primary focus is gender-based, human rights issues.
At the 2018 New York Festivals, Shiori won a silver award for the film she directed, Lonely Death, in the Social Issues category. In 2017, she wrote the book “Black Box” based upon her own experience of rape. The book reveals the sexism in Japan’ s society and institutions, and she won the Free Press Association of Japan Award for Best Journalism in 2018. “Black Box” is now available in Japanese, English, Chinese, French, Korean, and Italian among other languages.
For her contribution to Japan's #MeToo movement, she was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2020. She was also selected by Newsweek in 2019 for The Most Respected Japanese 100.

Eric Nyari, Producer

Based between New York and Tokyo, Eric is President of Cineric Creative as well as International Representative for renowned film restoration house Cineric, Inc.
Eric has produced numerous films in Japan, including director Amir Naderi's CUT, opening Opening Film of the 2011 Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. In documentary, he has produced the critically acclaimed portrait RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA, which premiered at Venice in 2017. The companion concert film, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: async LIVE AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY, premiered at the 2018 Berlinale.
Eric has managed 4K restorations of Kenji Mizoguchi's UGETSU, SANSHO THE BAILIFF, and A STORY FROM CHIKAMATSU with Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation, as well as Yasujiro Ozu's LATE SPRING.
Recently, he has produced; Ema Ryan Yamazaki's KOSHIEN: JAPAN’S FIELD OF DREAMS, a special co-production with NHK on the occasion of the 100th National High School Baseball Championship, which broadcast on ESPN and featured on the Criterion Channel; Takeshi Fukunaga’s AINU MOSIR, awarded a Special Jury Mention in Tribeca’s International Narrative Competition and released on Netflix through ARRAY.

Hanna Aqvilin, Producer

Hanna is a Swedish journalist and film producer/director based in London. She spent several years at the British BAFTA-winning production company Archer’s Mark, serving as a producer on numerous award-winning films; ‘Being a Human person’, an intimate portrait of the world- renowned film director, Roy Andersson, and ‘Hold Your Breath: The Ice Dive’, which is currently streaming on Netflix.
Her producer credits include for the BBC, Al Jazeera, Nat Geo and Netflix and prior to this, Hanna worked as a broadcast journalist for The Swedish Public Service. Hanna’s projects are often about social issues, women’s empowerment and mental health, and uses intimate and humanizing storytelling. She started to work on this feature documentary together with Shiori Ito back in 2017, and together they are running a UK-based production company, Hanashi films.