It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYC.

Good morning.

I'm David First, WNYC's weekend edition host filling in for Brian today.

Every year in Oscar season, as most of the media focus on the

competition for Best Picture and Best Actors, the Brian Lair Show invites the makers of the five

nominees for Best Feature-length Documentary on to talk about their films. And we'll kick off the series

with one of those interviews right now,

and then I'll be back to finish up today's show. But here's Brian Lair with the director of

the film Black Box Diaries recorded last week. This is the intensely personal and yet very public

autobiographical story of journalist Chiori Ito, who became kind of the face of the Me Too movement in Japan, after she went public in 2017 with an accusation of rape against a prominent male journalist there, Noriukai Yamaguchi, who was close with the prime minister, Shinsou Abe.

The film, Black Box Diaries, is based on the book that Edo wrote about her ordeal and eventual legal victory called Black Box.

The legal victory, like with E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump, for example, was not a criminal conviction, but a civil suit with a damages award. And like Mr.

Trump, Mr. Yamaguchi continues to deny he did anything wrong. As you might imagine, Ciora Ito

suffered all kinds of public shaming and social media abuse in the process. The film even opens with

a trigger warning for people who have suffered sexual abuse themselves

and might find certain scenes hard to watch. So take that trigger warning as a warning even for

this segment. Much of her interaction with people in Black Box Diaries is in Japanese,

but the actual video diary entries are in English. So here's a clip

from the opening one before we bring Mizzito on, in which she is bracing herself for the big

changes that will likely come for herself and others as she plans to hold a news conference

to state her accusation.

This could be a big change in my life and some others or many others.

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