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After announcing its winners list last month, the 85th Peabody Awards ceremony was in full swing tonight at Los Angeles’ Beverly Wilshire Hotel — in its third year at the locale — in a fete hosted by comedian Roy Wood Jr.

The red carpet ahead of the main show drew stars like Anna Kendrick, Benito Skinner, Joel Kim Booster, Jon Hamm, Amy Poehler, Kerry Washington and Molly Shannon, as well as Peabody awardees like Amber Sealey (Disney+’s Out of My Mind), Shiori Itō (MTV Documentary Films/Showtime’s Black Box Diaries), Josh Greenbaum (Netflix’s Will & Harper), Richard Gadd (Netflix’s Baby Reindeer), the executive producers of Mr Bates vs The Post Office and the cast of Say Nothing.

The team from Al Jazeera (which took home two Peabody Awards) walked the red carpet while holding placards commemorating the slain journalists in Gaza that read “Targeting journalists is a crime...

Reigning Emmy champs Baby Reindeer and Shōgun were among the winners at the 2025 Peabody Awards, announced on Thursday. This year's winners will be honored during a formal ceremony June 1 in Los Angeles, hosted by Roy Wood Jr.

The Peabody Awards Board of Jurors selected the prestigious honorees in the categories of arts, children's/youth, documentary, entertainment, interactive and immersive, news, public service, and radio/podcast. Baby Reindeer and Shōgun are among the seven entertainment winners, with the others being Fantasmas, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Ripley, Say Nothing, and We Are Lady Parts.

The winners were chosen by a unanimous vote of 27 jurors from more than 1,000 total entries. Together, they "encompass a wide range of contemporary and historical issues, including the war in Gaza, rural healthcare, a focus on disabilities, authoritarianism, and sexual violence,” said Jeffrey Jones, executive director of Peabody. The eligibility period was the 2024 calendar year.

Here...

As Cph:dox gears up for its 2025 edition, organizers have unveiled an audacious program of more than 200 films with a sharp focus on human rights under the theme “Right Here, Right Now.”

With 94 world premieres – 68 of them feature-length, the highest number in the festival’s history – Cph:dox continues to expand its global footprint.

For the third consecutive year, all main competition titles are world premieres. While this is not a formal selection criterion, artistic director Niklas Engstrøm tells Variety, “The fact that top directors chose to premiere their films with us speaks volumes about how the festival has grown.” He adds that shifting the festival from November to March in 2017 strengthened its global standing, positioning it as the go-to European launchpad for U.S. filmmakers after Sundance.

Niklas Engstrom

Hot Sundance titles heading to Cph:Dox include “Mr Nobody against Putin,” “The Dating Game” and “Zodiac Killer Project.”

Among the world...

Black Box Diaries Documentary Impact (Photo Credit – Instagram)

Shiori Itō is a journalist who won rave accolades at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary film Black Box Diaries. The documentary covers the journalist’s journey of facing sexual assault and its subsequent investigation case in Japan.

Black Box Diaries follows Shiori Itō’s journey as she rehashes her sexual assault case. She was sexually abused by Noriyuki Yamaguchi, who was the Washington D.C. Bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System. He was also well-acquainted with the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The incident dates back to 2015 when Shiori Itō was an intern at Thomas Reuters. She was invited to a business get-together, and after that event, Yamaguchi took an inebriated Itō to his hotel, The Sheraton in Tokyo, and allegedly sexually assaulted her. The police were reluctant to investigate the case, citing age-old laws in Japan that...

Shiori Itō’s directorial debut, Black Box Diaries, has won acclaim around the world since its debut at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, recently earning an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. But there’s one place it hasn’t been seen: in the director’s native Japan.

The film, distributed in 58 countries globally and by MTV Documentary Films in the U.S., tells a first-person story of Itō’s attempt to seek justice and accountability after she was sexually assaulted by a prominent Japanese journalist.

“We’ve been struggling to bring the film to Japan, and we hoped the [Oscar] nomination can get us through,” Itō told us in Berlin before she headed to London for the BAFTAs over the weekend, where Black Box Diaries was nominated for Best Documentary. “But instead, the nomination created another backfire, pushback, and we still don’t have distribution or theaters to do it yet.

Under picturesque snowfall and sub-zero temperatures, Timothée Chalamet braved the chill in Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz on Friday, stopping to sign autographs for a polite group of fans and collectors. The actor was in town to promote “A Complete Unknown,” his Bob Dylan biopic launching in Germany on Feb. 27 — but let’s be honest, there’s another reason for the European detour: Oscar campaigning.

While none of the eager autograph hunters will be checking his name on a ballot, multiple AMPAS voters later attended the film’s glittering Berlinale screening, making this yet another crucial pit stop on the road to the Dolby Theatre.

A short flight away and two weeks earlier, Demi Moore was making her presence felt at Armani Privé’s spring 2024 show during Couture Week in Paris. Her body horror thriller “The Substance” — directed by Parisian filmmaker Coralie Fargeat — has been making waves all season, with Moore...

Even for someone who lived the events she was documenting, filmmaker Shiori Itō could’ve constructed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Black Box Diaries” many ways. The Japanese journalist was sexually assaulted in 2015 and wrote a 2017 memoir about her attempt to prosecute the perpetrator, working from records and recordings she kept at the time. Armed with an iPhone, she also began filming.

But “Black Box Diaries” isn’t just confessional videos into a phone camera; the project was a grueling process of years for Itō and her collaborators to give the film the eventual shape of the MTV documentary. Itō tried everything, from stop motion animation to a heist-like recreation where she booked the same hotel room where she’d been assaulted (under a friend’s name) and smuggled in the life-size body doll that police once made her use to re-enact her assault for them to judge whether to prosecute her case.

Looking at the past to understand the present, making art as a form of resistance, addressing trauma through storytelling — these were just some of the topics that the filmmakers behind four of the five Oscar-nominated feature documentaries discussed during a panel hosted by TheWrap’s Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond that was part of our ongoing Screening Series. Joining Pond were “Sugarcane” directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie; “Black Box Diaries” director Shiori Itō; “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” director Johan Grimonprez; and “Porcelain War” producer Paula DuPré Pesman.

“Sugarcane” and “Black Box Diaries” are the most personal of the four films, though that was not necessarily the “Sugarcane” directors’ original intention. The documentary investigates the systemic abuse and murder of indigenous children in residential schools in Canada and the U.S. that, overseen by the governments and the Catholic Church, were implemented at the end of the 19th...

Updated with reaction from Sugarcane directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. No Other Land, the documentary that condemns Israeli rule over the occupied West Bank, earned an Academy Award nomination this morning, cementing its frontrunner status.

The feature directed by a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers has scooped up most of the pre-Oscar awards, including top prize at the Cinema Eye Honors, Best Documentary and Best Director at the IDA Awards, Best European Documentary at the European Film Awards, and the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, where No Other Land premiered last February.

The film offers a ground level view of life for Palestinians in the rural area of Masafer Yatta, where West Bank villagers live under constant threat of expulsion from their homes by Israel Defense Forces who claim their land for a military training zone. The nomination comes just days after a...

We have some suggestions if you’re looking for a movie to watch on streaming this weekend. Our list includes a top pick that’s a current awards contender available for home viewing this week; two other new releases that may or may not be awards contenders; a recommendation for a similar film that would make a nice double feature with the top pick; and a past Academy Award winner worth rewatching at the moment—got all that? Let’s go!

Top pick: Flow

After winning the Golden Globe for Best Animated Film, Flow has gone from a likely Academy Award nominee to a potential Best Animated Feature category winner. And if it also manages to snag a Best International Feature nomination, it would become the first Latvian film to earn an Academy Award bid.

Flow is a dialogue-free adventure about an adorable cat that gets swept away by a...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

2024 saw the flicker of a major flame in the strands of cinema that have my heart the most.

It was a year where sex, romance, and representation were back on the menu in exciting new configurations, mirrored behind the camera and in front of the screen. Films that made us feel, self-reflect, introspect, change our minds, and realize. In a sociopolitical climate increasingly intent on sidelining and disavowing empathy at every turn, it’s comforting to know that we are not immune to movies.

Favorite Big Screen Rediscoveries: Zerophilia, Moving, Bumpkin Soup, Manji, Their Last Love Affair

Honorable Mentions: Caught by the Tides, Summer Solstice, Gift, Ghost Cat Anzu, You Burn Me

10. Happyend (Neo Sora)

In 2024, Japanese cinema began to travel and shift in new ways. The...

Members of the Academy Documentary Branch sifted through 169 eligible nonfiction features to determine this year’s shortlist. The 15 selected films are beautifully crafted docs about interesting and important subjects. Ten docs that made the list premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, while the five remaining debuted at other top-tier festivals, including Berlin, Venice and Toronto.

“No Other Land,” about the resistance of Palestinian activists against forced displacement in the West Bank, won the best documentary prize at the Berlin International Film Festival and recently earned top accolades from the National Board of Review. The film does not have U.S. distribution. Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s “Union,” about a group of current and former Amazon workers attempting to unionize employees, premiered at Sundance. After successful screenings at 50 festivals worldwide, Story and Maing self-released “Union” via Level Ground this fall. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s “Porcelain War” also debuted in Park City,...

An elderly woman turns to a camera over her shoulder and, staring into the lens, says without self-pity, “I’m dying.” Incarcerated men, unaccustomed to wearing suits and ties, anxiously adjust their attire in preparation for a daddy-daughter dance behind bars. A drag performance artist walks through Moscow streets, duct-taped in the colors of the Russian flag. Argentinian gauchos traverse a landscape at thrilling speed, photographed in black and white. A histrionic Nikita Khruschev bangs his shoe on a desk, synched to a jazz rhythm.

These are some of the startling images that remain with me as I think back on the year in documentary film. Despite the sluggish acquisition market, nonfiction filmmakers continued to unveil remarkable work, whether they landed distribution or not.

Typically, I can tell within the first minute or less if I’m in the hands of a filmmaker with the confidence and skill to create...

Exclusive: Black Box Diaries, the award-winning documentary that just made the Oscar shortlist, will debut on Paramount+ with Showtime in the U.S. next month.

Shiori Itō’s film, winner of the Human Rights Award at Cph:dox and three awards at the Zurich Film Festival among many other honors, will bow on the streaming platform January 7. Oscar nomination voting begins the next day – Wednesday, Jan. 8.

“Black Box Diaries follows director Ito’s courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender,” notes a release. “Unfolding like a thriller and combining secret investigative recordings, vérité shooting and emotional first-person video, her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s desperately outdated judicial and societal systems.”

Shiori Itō (wearing scarf) surrounded by Japanese media after a press conference

The documentary marks Itō’s feature film directorial debut. “A journalist, writer and filmmaker...

The Academy has unveiled the 10 shortlists for the 97th Academy Awards in March, with Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig and Walter Salles’sI’m Still Here among the international feature film category heavyweights.

Besides the French, German and Brazilian contenders, the list includes Mati Diop’s Dahomey for Senegal, Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap for Ireland, Maura Delpero’s Vermiglio for Italy, Sandhya Suri’s Santosh for the UK, and Matthew Rankin’sUniversal Language for Canada.

Europe accounts for 10 or two-thirds of the shortlist, Africa and Middle East two, and Americas two,...

The 40th annual IDA Documentary Awards took place Dec. 5, 2024 at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. The ceremony was hosted by actor and comedian Adam Conover, and celebrated the best nonfiction films and programs of the year. See the full list of 2024 IDA Awards winners below.

Heading into the evening, “Sugarcane” led all nominees with five, including Best Feature Documentary, followed by “Soundtrack to Coup d’Etat” with four. The ceremony takes place from 7 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. Pt and we will continue to update winners throughout the night. You can live stream the ceremony on documentary.org and on the IDA’s YouTube channel.

The ceremony started with presenting “No Other Land” with two special honors: The Pare Lorentz Award and the Courage Under Fire Award. The Emerging Filmmaker Award went to “Black Box Diaries” director Shiori Itô. The ABC News Video Source Award went to “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.

At the IDA Documentary Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday night, Japanese journalist-turned-director Shiori Itō will receive the Emerging Filmmaker Award, recognizing the incredible reception for her directorial debut Black Box Diaries. It’s the deeply personal story of Itō’s attempt to seek justice and accountability after she became the victim of a sexual assault, a public campaign of many years that ultimately led to changes in Japanese law.

The film, which has emerged as a strong Oscar contender, scored IDA Awards nominations this year in three additional categories including Best Documentary Feature and Best Director. Itō joins Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to share insights on making the film, winner of awards at Cph:Dox in Copenhagen, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, Zurich Film Festival and many others.

The director explains why the strictures of Japanese culture and norms of politeness embedded in...

For three years, Netflix has gone without a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nomination for one its originals, a surprising dry spell for a streamer used to dominating the category. But it looks like the drought is about to end.

The platform has fielded an exceptional slate of contenders in 2024, many with a strong shot at making the Oscar Documentary Feature shortlist — the first step toward an Academy Award nomination. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Daughters, Will & Harper, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Power, The Greatest Night in Pop, Martha, Skywalkers: A Love Story, Yintah — they all present a solid opportunity for Netflix to compete for the top documentary prize.

“I feel very honored to be a part of this incredible slate of movies,” says Josh Greenbaum, director of Will & Harper, a kind of buddy comedy about the friendship between actor Will Ferrell and his pal Harper Steele,...

The International Documentary Association today released its shortlist of contenders for Best Feature Documentary and Best Short Documentary, a possible harbinger of Oscar success.

Among the features making the list is No Other Land, a documentary by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers that has yet to secure U.S. distribution. It has won awards at festivals from Berlin and Busan to Belfast and beyond.

Queendom, a film about the extraordinary Russian drag performance artist Jenna Marvin continues its surge, making the IDA shortlist after securing a place on the Doc NYC shortlist of the year’s best documentaries.

National Geographic’s Sugarcane, about atrocities at a so-called Indian residential school in Canada, continued its strong pre-Oscar awards run by making the IDA list of contenders. Netflix made the list with The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a strong Oscar contender. And MTV Documentary Films earned a spot with Black Box Diaries,...

A young journalist documents her fight to bring her assailant to justice in one of the most powerful documentaries of the year. Here’s our Black Box Diaries review.

As Black Box Diaries opens, CCTV footage shows a man dragging a semi-conscious woman from a car into a hotel. The car is a taxi; the driver does nothing. The hotel is high-end; a man holds the door open for them. The woman is the film’s director, Shiori Itō; in 2015, she was a trainee journalist seeking career advice from Noriyuki Yamaguchi, the Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System and a friend of then–prime minister Shinzo Abe. Yamaguchi drugged her, took her into the hotel, and raped her.

In a country whose sexual assault legislation was written more than a century earlier, and with an age of consent as low as 13 years old, the #MeToo movement would prove,...

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...

Exclusive: MTV Documentary Films’ Oscar-contender I Am Ready, Warden, directed by Smriti Mundhra, will premiere on Paramount+ November 22. The short documentary, about a death row inmate seeking the possibility of redemption as his execution date approaches, earned its latest award over the weekend at the Woodstock Film Festival.

The project reunites MTV Documentary Films with Mundhra; they teamed up for the 2019 short documentary St. Louis Superman, which earned the first Academy Award nomination for MTV’s nonfiction banner. It also brought the first Oscar nom to Mundhra and her fellow director on that film, Sami Khan.

I Am Ready, Warden, which premiered earlier this year at Montana’s Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, “tells the harrowing and emotionally charged story of John Henry Ramirez, a man convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Texas,” according to a release. “Through his time on death row, the film offers a rare...

The 20th Zurich Film Festival wrapped up this past weekend after celebrating many accomplishments in cinema. The international film event, held in Zurich, Switzerland, recognizes films and people in the movie industry through competitive awards.

In the main film competition, the movie “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” won the top Golden Eye award. The film’s director, Rungano Nyoni, Accepted the prize from the jury of five film experts led by acclaimed director Lee Daniels. Nyoni’s movie stood out from other strong competitors. Another competition highlight was giving special recognition to Jianjie Lin’s film “Brief History of a Family”.

The documentary competition also saw “Black Box Diaries” take the Golden Eye award. The film was directed by Shiori Itō and impressed the documentary jury led by Kevin Macdonald. They noted the film’s powerful story and filmmaking quality. Other documtentaries earning mentions included Sandi DuBowski’s “Sabbath Queen...

Concluding its 20th year, the Zurich Film Festival has named the winners this year’s Golden Eye.

As the festival wrapped up this weekend in Switzerland, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and Black Box Diaries took home the Zff’s Golden Eye awards in the Feature Film and Documentary Competitions.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was selected by jury president Lee Daniels and members Souheila Yacoub, Jo Willems, Ewa Puszczyńska and Sophie Deraspe, with Jianjie Lin’s Brief History of a Family earning special mention.

Black Box Diaries was chosen by jury president Kevin Macdonald and members Franziska Sonder, Vincent Kelner, Anna Hints and Ben Bernhard, with Sandi DuBowski’s Sabbath Queen and Kinshuk Surjan’s Marching in the Dark recieving special mention.

Other winners include Les Courageux, Leeuwin and Die Heinzels 2: Neue Mützen, Neue Mission, with the latter two competing in Zff for Kids. Also honored at the festival were Kate Winslet,...

“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” has been awarded the Golden Eye at Zurich Film Festival.

Jury president Lee Daniels – joined by Souheila Yacoub, Jo Willems, Sophie Deraspe and Ewa Puszczyńska – praised director Rungano Nyoni and her “miraculous” second film about past traumas finally coming to the surface when a family prepares for a funeral of an uncle: “We believe she’ll take over Hollywood,” he said.

“From the first shot of this film, we are thrust into a world that is spectacularly shot, filled with incredible music, exquisite sound design and acting that left us all breathless,” he added, calling it a surreal, dramatic comedy full of surprises about the lies we tell ourselves.”

Following the film’s Cannes premiere, Variety’s Guy Lodge called Nyoni’s film “darkly transfixing” and “at once intrepidly daring and rigorously poised.”

Festival director Christian Jungen told Variety: “It’s a very original and...

Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl has won top honors at the 20th Zurich Film Festival, winning the Golden Eye for best film.

Zurich’s competition jury, led by Lee Daniels, praised the film for its spectacular cinematography, exquisite sound design and breathtaking performances. Nyoni’s follow-up to her breakout debut I Am Not A Witch is a surreal and seriocomic family drama about sexual abuse, set in Zambia’s capital city of Lusaka. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section this year, winning best director for the Welsh-Zambian filmmaker.

Shiori Itō’s Black Box Diaries won Zurich’s audience award and took best documentary honors. The astounding investigative film follows the five years Itō spent trying to bring to justice the older, more powerful man who sexually assaulted her. The film, which premiered at Sundance, earned accolades from the documentary jury for...

Now in its 40th year, the International Documentary Association (IDA) announced its three honorary awards on Wednesday, which will be presented at the organization’s annual gala on Dec. 5 at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles.

American documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter will receive the Career Achievement Award. After working as a litigator before moving into filmmaking, she has directed eight feature documentaries over the past decade, including “Gideon’s Army” and “John Lewis: Good Trouble.”

Journalist, activist and director Shiori Itō, whose recent film “Black Box Diaries” chronicled her own sexual assault investigation against a newspaper publisher in Japan, will receive the Emerging Filmmaker Award.

Additionally, the four directors of this year’s “No Other Land” — the Israeli-Palestinian collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — will be presented with the Courage Under Fire Award. The doc was filmed over a five-year period in Palestine’s West Bank.

The 68th BFI London Film Festival has just announced the line-up and – as always – a wide variety of Asian films is included in the vast Programme. Over 12 days, the Lff will showcase 255 works from 80 countries, featuring 64 languages and including 112 projects made by female and non-binary filmmakers.

The London Film Festival, officially called the BFI London Film Festival is organised annually by the British Film Institute (BFI) since 1953. It is the UK’s largest public Festival of its kind and is visited by thousands of film enthusiasts who have the the ability to see films, documentaries and shorts from all over the world. The festival will take place at London’s BFI Southbank and The Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, as well as cinemas and venues across central London, and will run from 9 to 20 October 2024.

All the info about tickets and booking are Here.

And now, let’s browse the...

A restored edition of Chen Kaige’s “Yellow Earth” is one of the highlights of the selection for the 8th edition of China’s boutique Pingyao International Film Festival. The film, which helped put Chinese art-house cinema on the map overseas and signaled a new era of Chinese directors, now referred to the FIfth Generation, was originally released 40 years ago.

The festival, which runs Sept. 24-30, will open with the world premiere of Liu Juan’s “A River Without Tears.”

The festival’s Hidden Dragons section of Chinese-made films includes: the Asian premiere of Ma Lanhua’s “Hello, Spring”; the Asian premiere of Tang Yongkan’s “Stars and the Moon”; and world premieres of Wang Lina’s “Village Music”; Zhu Xin’s “A Song River”; Yang Suiyi’s “Karst”; Luka Yang Yuanyuan’s “Chinatown Cha-Cha”; Shen Tao’s “Floating Clouds Obscure the Sun”; Siu Koon-ho’s “True Love, For Once...

Sarajevo Film Festival has selected 18 titles for its Kinoscope strand and seven for its In Focus section, including a range of 2024 festival hits from Berlin and Cannes.

The Kinoscope selection consists of 12 Kinoscope films, and six titles in genre strand Kinoscope Surreal.

Scroll down for the full list of titles

Titles include Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which won the Grand Prix in Cannes Competition this year; and Santosh, the debut feature of 2023 Screen Star of Tomorrow Sandhya Suri, which debuted in Un Certain Regard.

Guan Hu’s Black Dog, winner of the Un Certain Regard prize,...

As we head into the latter half of 2024, some frontrunners are emerging among documentaries in the race for Oscar recognition.

On the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, hosts John Ridley and Matt Carey assess the state of play at this (admittedly) early stage in awards season, with the Venice, Telluride and Toronto film festivals yet to unveil potential contenders.

One of the most intriguing storylines: the reemergence of Netflix, which fields its strongest slate in years, after going without an Oscar nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category for three years. The streamer’s lineup includes Daughters, Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Power, Skywalkers and The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.

MTV Documentary Films advances Black Box Diaries from director Shiori Itō, centered on the director’s attempt to get justice after she became the victim of an alleged sexual assault by a prominent Japanese journalist.

The 50th Annual Seattle International Film Festival (Siff) wrapped up on Sunday and announced the winners of the 2024 Golden Space Needle Audience and Juried Competition Awards.

The festival began on May 9 and screened 261 films representing 84 countries with “62% of the feature films were created by first or second-time filmmakers; 43% were created by women or nonbinary filmmakers; 35% of filmmakers identify as a Bipoc director; and nearly 60% are currently without U.S. distribution and may not screen commercially in the United States,” according to Siff.

Siff holds two categories of competition: juried and audience based. Juried competitions include five feature subcategories including the Official Competition, New American Cinema Competition, New Directors Competition, Ibero-American Competition and Documentary Competition. Short film categories include live action, animation and documentary.

In addition, over 32,000 ballots were submitted for the Golden Space Needle Awards (Gsna). Films judged through the GSNAs are selected by audience members through post-screening ballots. The categories include best film,...

London-based documentary specialist Dogwoof has landed a raft of international sales for Shiori Ito’s Sundance premiere Black Box Diaries.

The documentary feature has been picked up by Art House Films (France), Trigon (Switzerland), Periscoop (Benelux), NonStop (Scandinavia & Baltics), Anticipate Pictures (Singapore), Filmin (Spain), Sherry Media (Canada) and Edko (Hong Kong).

Star Sands, one of the film’s co-producers and financiers, will release the film theatrically in Japan, while Dogwoof will distribute in the UK and Ireland this autumn.

As previously announced, MTV Documentary Films has acquired the film for US distribution.

Black Box Diaries follows the director’s investigation...

MTV Documentary Films has acquired U.S. rights to Shiori Ito’s “Black Box Diaries.”

The docu, about the investigation of the director’s own alleged sexual assault, debuted in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and has been an audience favorite at this year’s Cph:dox, South by Southwest and Hot Docs film festivals.

MTV will theatrically release “Black Box Diaries” this fall, beginning in October at New York’s Film Forum. The film will be qualified for awards consideration before streaming on Paramount+ for subscribers with the Showtime plan later this year. Last year, the division released two Oscar nominated docs — Maite Alberdi’s feature length “The Eternal Memory” and Sheila Nevin’s short titled “The ABCs of Book Banning.”

Ito’s 103-minute film tracks her arduous, five-year struggle to bring to justice renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi for allegedly sexually assaulting her in...

The Mammoth Lakes Film Festival revealed its lineup for this year’s festival, taking place from May 22 – 26 at venues across Mammoth Lakes.

The festival will open with the California premiere of director Lucy Lawless’ “Never Look Away,” which follows a CNN combat camerawoman who gets injured and must find the strength to carry on. The closing night features “Black Box Diaries,” directed by Shiori Ito, who investigates her own sexual assault through the film.

A Short Films Program will also be featured at the festival, consisting of 38 narrative shorts, 20 documentary shorts, 10 animation shorts and a program of music videos and a screenplay competition.

The Mlff film lineup is as follows:

North American Narrative Features:

All I’ve Got and Then Some

Tehben Dean and Rasheed Stephens | United States

Atikamekw Suns

Chloé Leriche | Canada

Psykhodrame

Miles Blim | United States

The Last Night in the Life of Death

Isaiah Brody | United States...

Shiori Ito’s feature documentary “Black Box Diaries” about the investigation of the director’s own sexual assault, earned a standing ovation following its Hot Docs Canadian premiere on Monday.

The 103-minute film tracks Ito’s arduous, five-year struggle to bring to justice renowned TV reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, who sexually assaulted her. In 2015, Ito – then a 26-year-old intern at Thomson Reuters – went out for a drink with Yamaguchi, only to become intoxicated and taken against her will to his hotel room.

In Japan, according to the film, only 4% of victims of rape report their cases to police. But Ito “felt a strong desire for the truth to be known and to change Japanese society in order to prevent what happened to me from happening to more women.”

In 2017, Ito’s memoir about the rape, titled “Black Box,” was published and went on to win the Free Press Association of Japan...

A 17-title buying spree from Scandinavian and Baltic distributor NonStop Entertainment includes deals for Mati Diop’s Berlinale Golden Bear winner Dahomey, and Aaron Schimberg’s Sundance title A Different Man.

Diop’s documentary Dahomey tells the story of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey (located within present-day Benin in Africa) that were returned to Benin after being held in a French museum. Films du Losange handles sales.

Sold by A24, Schimberg’s A Different Man stars Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson in the story of a man with neurofibromatosis, who undergoes surgery for a new start...

The Flats, a film about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, won the top award at Cph:dox in Copenhagen at a Friday night, earning a €10,000 prize.

The documentary directed by Alessadra Celisia takes place in “New Lodge in the center of Belfast, a neighborhood still haunted by the nearly 30-year conflict between Catholics and Protestants which officially ended in 1998.”

In their citation, the jury called the film witty, multi-layered, profound and provocative. They wrote, “Our main award recognizes not only creative and conceptual daring, but a filmmaker with the humility to realize when the story outgrows its framework, and the confidence to follow where it, and its fantastically vivid characters lead. We live in a world of divisions, borders and locked gates. Coming like a conversation shouted through one of those locked gates, our winning film is a collective portrait of several proud, funny, resourceful individuals, who would be willing to...

Alessandra Celesia’s The Flats scooped the main Dox:Award prize at Cph:Dox in Copenhagen this evening.

The film depicts a run-down Belfast housing estate, where echoes of conflict in Northern Ireland still haunt the lives of the residents.

Scroll down for the full list of winners

The Flats is a co-production between France’s Films de Force Majeure, the UK’s Dumbworld Productions, Ireland’s Planet Korda Pictures and Belgium’s Thank You & Good Night Productions.

The Cph:dox jury praised it for “not only creative and conceptual daring, but a filmmaker with the humility to realise when the story outgrows its framework,...

Ema Ryan Yamazaki has spent the past few years working on two very different films.

The Making Of A Japanese, which screened at Thessaloniki International Documentary Festiva (Tidf) this month, pictures life at an idyllic Japanese primary school; Black Box Diaries, which she edited and coproduced, is directed by Shiori Itō, and tells the harrowing story of Itō’s own sexual assault.

The film follows her attempt to bring to justice her high-profile rapist, the journalist and media personality Noriyuki Yamaguchi.

The Making Of A Japanese aims to show Japanese society at its best. The second reveals the misogyny, corruption...

Toronto’s Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary festival, has unveiled the full lineup of films that will screen in its Special Presentations program. The festival runs April 25 to May 5.

World premieres include “Red Fever,” which sees Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond travel to the four corners of Turtle Island and across Europe to explore the world’s fascination with Native Americans; “American Cats: The Good, the Bad, and the Cuddly,” in which “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” correspondent Amy Hoggart explores the controversial practice of declawing cats; “The Ride Ahead,” an expansion of co-director Samuel Habib’s short film “My Disability Roadmap” (which got an Honorable Mention in the International Shorts section of Hot Docs in 2022), exploring a typical 21-year-old itching to move out, start a career and find love—all while navigating life with a disability; “Lost in the Shuffle,” which follows world champion magician Shawn Farquhar as...

Cph:dox, one Europe’s leading documentary film festivals, has announced its full program, which includes no fewer than 84 world premieres out of more than 200 films being screened in the Danish capital and nationwide from March 13 through March 24.

This 21st edition, which aims to make documentary film accessible not only to a select industry few but to the public at large, will take off with a new nationwide approach, with mini festivals running simultaneously in nearly half of Denmark’s municipalities. In addition, alongside the six main awards, a new Audience Award is being revived by popular request, which comes with a €5,000 prize.

Running alongside the festival’s overarching theme of “Body Politics,” which explores questions about the body and our understanding of it, organizers have announced the other main theme of this edition: “Conflicted.”

Born from the war in Gaza, which has hit the headlines again since Oct. 7 last year,...

Shiori Ito – face of Japan's #MeToo movement, one of Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020, and author of award-winning memoir “Black Box” (2017) – assembled a documentary recording her rollercoaster of a lawsuit against her rapist, Noriyuki Yamagauchi. This marks her debut feature, “Black Box Diaries,” which premiered as a part of the World Cinema – Documentary Competition at Sundance Film Festival last month.

“Black Box Diaries” premiered at Sundance 2024 in the World Cinema – Documentary Competition. Its sales are managed by Dogwoof.

The documentary follows the heels of other stories that have been published that focus on the #MeToo movement, such as Chanel Miller's memoir, “Know My Name” (2019); Ursula Macfarlane's Weinstein investigation “Untouchable” (2019); and more recently, the prolonged court battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (2022). While many of the previous examples are centered in the US, however, Ito's investigative journalistic take on her own rape case explores the legal murkiness of the Japanese court.

Cph:dox, the prestigious documentary film festival in Copenhagen, has announced a competition program across six categories that features 47 world premieres.

The event, which has emerged as a rival to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) as the biggest and most important all-documentary festival in the world, will unfold from March 13-24 in the Danish capital. The Dox:award lineup – all world premieres – features films from the U.S., Canada, the Nordic countries and many other parts of Europe, including France, Ireland, and the U.K. Scroll for the lineups in all six competition strands.

“We’re thrilled to present this year’s competition films, which span from global geopolitics to intimate, existential queries,” noted Niklas Engstrøm, Cph:dox artistic director. “What unites these films is their ambition to engage with the world in a meaningful way. This year’s competition sharpens its focus on the most urgent issues of our time, from...

Filmmakers Alex Gibney, Johan Grimonprez and Laura Huertas Millan, along with industry figures Jessica Harrop from Sandbox and Marie Nelson from Hot Docs will be among the speakers at Cph:conference, the discussion program at documentary festival Cph:dox.

The program, which is curated in partnership with the training initiative Documentary Campus, has the theme “rebuilding narratives.”

The conference will kick off on March 18 with a collaboration with the Disco Network – made up of Ambulante, Aflamuna, DocsMX, Doc Society, DocSP, Docubox, In-Docs and India Docs – who will present and workshop “Our Declaration of Independence.” This session, led by Jad Abi-Khalil (Aflamuna) and Beadie Finzi (Doc Society), is a result of an initiative aiming to “articulate the importance of independent documentaries to culture, society and democracy, and to advocate for the resources and platforms they deserve.”

In the mornings of March 19-21, there will be thought-provoking conversations with filmmakers featured in this year’s Cph:dox program.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSRei.Tanaka Toshihiko’s Rei (2024)—the director’s debut feature, which he also produced and edited, and in which he acts—has won the Tiger Award in Rotterdam. Mark Gustafson, acclaimed animator and co-director of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), has died at the age of 64. Del Toro calls him “a pillar of stop-motion animation—a true artist.”In response to an open letter signed by more than 200 film workers (which has since been taken offline) the Berlin International Film Festival confirmed that it has invited two far-right German politicians to the opening ceremony but avers it stands “against right-wing extremism.”Recommended VIEWINGVia Dolorosa.The second part of Le Cinéma Club's two-week spotlight on Oraib Toukan features her film Via Dolorosa (2021), now streamable on the platform.

While it is far from easy to broach topics relating to sexual assault in a still-conservative Japan, actor-turned-director Urara Matsubayashi felt it was vital to channel the pain and frustrations of her own experience as a survivor into her craft. Such a process led to “Blue Imagine,” Matsubayashi’s directorial debut about a young actor who finds refuge in a safe house in the wake of a violent assault.

The safe house, in this case, is the titular Blue Imagine, a group that meets at a local restaurant to support each other as they go through the traumatizing aftermath of sexual violence. “The starting point was my own experience,” Matsubayashi tells Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. “But I also wanted to portray camaraderie between women, and show how #MeToo is not restricted to one country, but the entire world.”

The director...

In the middle of Black Box Diaries, journalist Shiori Ito’s debut documentary, Ito grins at the camera as she strolls through downtown Tokyo on the day of her book launch. It’s October 18, 2017. The New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein news two weeks ago. Alyssa Milano popularized the hashtag #MeToo two days ago. Ito, fresh-faced and 28, happily recounts these events to the camera. The world may finally be ready to listen to her.

It’s hard to imagine a time before the #MeToo genie was let out of its bottle, but that’s what Ito asks of viewers as they journey back with her to 2015, when she says she was raped by a senior journalist with connections to then-president Shinzo Abe. Through an incredible amount of personal documentation––primarily videos, audio recordings, and journal entries––she grants viewers unprecedented access into her experience as a woman seeking justice for sex crimes in Japan.

In Black Box Diaries, director Shiori Ito confronts abuse but also a deeply flawed legal system. Her quest for justice begins in spring 2015. Then a young intern at Thomson Reuters, Ito found herself in a nightmarish situation with Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a prominent media figure with political connections in Japan. At the time, he worked at the Tokyo Broadcasting System Television and was the personal biographer for Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister of Japan.

After she reported a sexual assault incident against Yamaguchi she was met with formidable challenges, as she navigated a legal system steeped in outdated laws that placed burden of proof on the victims. Ito’s struggle was not just against her assailant but also against a societal framework that silences survivors. Facing public slander, character assassination and the daunting reality of confronting Yamaguchi, she had no idea that acting as an investigative journalist for her own...

Amid the surfeit of films about women’s rights and men’s abuses of power that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, we haven’t yet seen one quite like “Black Box Diaries.” A tightly wound, heart-on-sleeve procedural documentary, Shiori Ito’s directorial debut identifies a world of systemic iniquities through the prism of a single, long labored-over case of sexual assault — crucially, the director’s own. That raw first-person perspective, untempered by the interests of another filmmaker and given narrative rigor by Ito’s substantial journalistic skills, makes “Black Box Diaries” not just a damning analysis of patriarchal power structures in contemporary Japan, but a vivid evocation of the day-to-day psychological swings and breaks that come with living as a survivor. The title’s allusion to diary-keeping is on point: Ito’s vulnerabilities can be discomfiting to witness, even with her consent.

A standout of the...