Film Screening: “Black Box Diaries” (Shiori Itō, 2024)

^{Shiori Ito, 2024, 103 minutes, in English and Japanese with English subtitles}

Join APSI, Screen/Society, and the Center for Documentary Studies for this special screening of a powerful documentary based on the international best-selling memoir that sparked Japan's #metoo movement.

Following the screening, director Shiori Itō will join a panel including Professors Anne Allison and Kimberly Hassel.

About the film:

Black Box Diaries follows director and journalist Shiori Itō's courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. 

Unfolding like a thriller and combining secret investigative recordings, vérité shooting and emotional first-person video, Itō's quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country's desperately outdated judicial and societal systems.

Watch the trailer:

Meet the panelists:

Shiori Itō

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Shiori Itō is an Oscar and BAFTA-nominated documentary filmmaker, journalist, and writer, and the co-founder of Hanashi Films, focusing on gender-based human rights issues, and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2020.

She has directed numerous documentaries in Sierra Leone, Turkey, Peru, Japan, and many other parts of the world, exploring themes of justice, gender, and resilience through intimate storytelling. Her first feature documentary, Black Box Diaries, premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and has since been released globally. The film won a Peabody Award, received Oscar and BAFTA nominations, and earned more than twenty international prizes. Screened in more than sixty countries.

Shiori is also the author of Black Box (2017), a work of non-fiction based on her own experience of sexual violence that exposed systemic sexism in Japan. The book received the Free Press Association of Japan’s Best Journalism Award in 2018 and has been translated into ten languages, including English. Her latest book, Swim Naked (2023), published in Japan and China, explores themes of resilience, vulnerability, and survival.

Her work has appeared in outlets such as Reuters, BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Economist. She was named One Young World’s Journalist of the Year in 2022. She also serves as an ambassador for NO MORE, a global organization committed to ending domestic and sexual violence. Alongside her filmmaking and writing, Shiori delivers talks and lectures at universities, high schools, and international forums, sharing her experiences to inform, inspire, and empower the next generation.

Anne Allison

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Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products, the precarity of irregular workers, and new death practices in "post-familial" Japan. 

Professor Allison is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994)—an ethnography of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining employees and customers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs; Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (University of California Press 2000)—a collection of essays analyzing the complex desires linking motherhood, pornographic comics, and popular culture; Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006)—a study of the intermeshing of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of Japan's brand of "cool" youth-goods on the global marketplace, and Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) about the socio-economic shifts in post-corporatist Japan towards precaritization of work, sociality, and everyday security. 

Her most recent book, Being Dead Otherwise (Duke University Press, 2023) looks at changes in mortuary practice when the family grave--once so conventional in Japan--is becoming outdated, even abandoned. Examining new trends for where dead wind up "otherwise (such as automated columbaria) in Japan today, the book considers historical, socio-economic, and existential factors involved in the place (or lack thereof) of a final resting place for those with (or without) others to tend to them.

Kimberly Hassel

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Kimberly Hassel is a sociocultural anthropologist and digital ethnographer specializing in digital culture, youth culture, and identity in the contexts of Japan and its diasporas. She also specializes in Afro-Asia, with a particular focus on Afro-Japanese encounters in Black American popular culture and the Dominican Republic. Her current book project, tentatively titled Solitude and Solidarity: Digital Sociality, Youth Culture, and Pandemic Times in Japan, examines the relationships between Social Networking Services, smartphones, and shifting notions of sociality and selfhood in Japan, especially among young people. Professor Hassel's examination of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital sociality in Japan and ethnographic methods on a broader scale has appeared in Anthropology News. Her research on instabae (Instagenic) culture and Instagram use among girls and young women as extensions of historical and ongoing forms of gendered socialities and worldmaking practices has been published in Mechademia. She also engages in public scholarship on the topic of digital culture and youth culture in transnational contexts, most recently for The Nation Magazine. 

Professor Hassel also specializes in diaspora studies, critical mixed race studies, and Afro-Japanese encounters. Her research has examined media portrayals of mixed-race identity in Japan vis-à-vis lived experience. She presents and publishes on topics pertaining to positionality in academia, anthropology, and Japanese Studies, drawing upon her own experiences as a Dominican American ethnographer of Japan. For her second book project, she is examining the experiences of Dominican diasporic communities in Japan and Japanese diasporic communities in the Dominican Republic. At Duke, Professor Hassel teaches courses on Japanese popular culture, contemporary Japanese society through an anthropological lens, and critical digital studies. She is a faculty affiliate of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and is a co-director of the Digital Asia Research Cluster. She also serves as an advisory board member for the Humanities Research Center at Duke Kunshan University.

Location & Parking Information

The Rubenstein Arts Center is nestled within the university’s central campus on Campus Drive, across from the Nasher Museum of Art and near the Sarah P. Duke Gardens.

Limited free parking for visitors, including accessible parking, is available starting at 6:30 PM in the Campus Drive lot.

• The entrance to the lot is on Anderson Street; the gate will be open.
• Spaces are available on a first-come, first-serve basis.
• This lot is across the street from the Rubenstein Arts Center.
• Visitors attending the film screening to not need to pay for parking via BlueSpot.

There is also sometimes free street parking along Alexander Avenue (southbound side) and Oregon Street (southbound side).

Public Transit

The easiest way to reach the Rubenstein Arts Center from elsewhere on campus is to take a free Duke Transit shuttle along Campus Drive. The main East-West bus (C1) runs seven days a week during the academic year, with service throughout the day and well into the night.

Visitors to Duke can also consider taking public transit. GoDurham buses are fare-free (via the Umo app or card); GoDurham #6 stops at Duke University Rd and Anderson St., next to the Nasher Museum.

For those coming from UNC Chapel Hill, the Robertson Express bus runs daily between the Morehead Planetarium and Science Drive Circle. It is then only a short walk from Science Drive to Abele Quad, where the C1 East-West bus is located.

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