Japanese journalist Shiori Itō tells how she pursued her rape case against a prominent TV executive

This is the remarkable story of Japanese journalist Shiori Itō, who waived a legal right to anonymity to pursue her rape case against prominent TV news executive Noriyuki Yamaguchi. The film gives us fly-on-the-wall video footage of her embattled life as she prepared her legal case and later as she wrote her memoir of the events, Black Box, named after the closed files on her case: the black boxes.

As a young journalism intern in 2015, she had turned up for what she thought would be a career-help chat with Yamaguchi. She was confused and uncomfortable to find it was at a bar where turning down his hospitality would be impolite; she became drunk and says she regained consciousness in a hotel room to find Yamaguchi raping her. Later, in a police station, officers made her re-enact the event with a male dummy. Itō became the figurehead of the Japanese #MeToo movement as hundreds of thousands of women in conservative, male-dominated Japan examined their own supposed memories of abuse. And as a journalist, Itō found herself on the trail of a Watergate-type story: her assailant was friendly with the Japanese prime minister and with police authorities who cancelled his arrest warrant. And all the time, she received a blizzard of online abuse. Yamaguchi maintains sex was consensual.