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Three films in the World Documentary section at Sundance Film Festival this year explore systems of oppression and those who unblinkingly challenge them. In “Black Box Diaries,” journalist Shiori Ito turns the camera on herself as she journeys through Japan’s broken judiciary system while she seeks the prosecution of the high-profile man who raped her. Fellow New Zealander Lucy Lawless helms “Never Look Away,” a lively profile of Margaret Moth, a pioneering CNN camerawoman renowned for her raw coverage of conflict zones in the 1990s. Johan Grimonprez’s dense film essay “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” traces the many social, political, and entertainment threads that wove together as the post-colonial Global South’s push for true independence seemed to hinge on the fate of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“I’m not an activist. I’m not a figure. I’m not propaganda for anything. I’m just a journalist who experienced this,” writer-director Shiori Ito says in “Black Box Diaries,” her heart-rending documentary that traces her legal battle to prosecute that man who raped her and the many social and legal hurdles that stood in her way.
A trigger warning advises those who have experienced sexual assault should try closing their eyes and taking a deep breath, a technique that has helped Ito, before watching the film. The next scene is the grainy security footage of the perpetrator dragging her out of a hired car and through a hotel lobby. The year was 2015 and Ito was a young journalism school graduate eager to connect with an older, esteemed colleague who might secure her a job in Washington D.C. Instead, Ito was sexually assaulted and the rest of her twenties would be spent seeking justice.
We follow Ito’s journey from 2017 when she went public via a press conference and wrote a book about her experiences as a woman working within the outdated rape laws of Japan’s judicial system — only physical harm proves rape; not lack of consent. Ito and editor Ema Ryan Yamazaki, elegantly stitch together video diaries, archival news coverage, interviews filmed with cell phones, taped legal sessions, and audio from private meetings, all of which shows the sheer amount of work it took to build Ito’s criminal and civil cases. Often their work is stonewalled, as if nothing will ever be enough to cut through the culture of misogyny and the powerful people who enable perpetrators to get off scot-free.
In one of the film’s most powerful sequences, she tearfully addresses her sisters in journalism, some older who have had similar experiences but felt pressured not to speak up, some younger who may now have a better path forward because of Ito. “I feel like I’m being covered by blankets,” she says of the warmth she feels being supported by her peers.
Throughout the film we viscerally feel Ito’s courage as speaks truth to power, her tenacity as she chases down important witnesses, her bravery when her choice to go public affects her relationship with her family, her fragility as the weight of the trauma pushes her toward suicidal ideation, and finally her resilience as she finds the strength to face herself and figure out who she wants to be now.
“Never Look Away,” the directorial debut of “Xena: Warrior Princess” herself Lucy Lawless, paints a similar portrait of an uncompromising woman who blazed a trail with her unwavering sense of purpose. Although she sometimes falters with first time filmmaker-isms (the over-reliance on graphics and pop songs is particularly egregious), Lawless not only crafts a fitting tribute to fearless CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth, her film also elicits chilling comparisons to the current geopolitical situation in Gaza.
Lawless introduces us to Moth with archival home video footage of the strikingly beautiful woman, her jet-black hair and thick cat-eye makeup suggesting she was someone born to stand out. While this footage is plentiful and rich, most of Moth’s life in these early sections are fleshed out via interviews with two rival lovers; Jeff Russi, whom she met when he was a teenager in Texas, and Yaschinka, a French sound recordist she met while on assignment in the Middle East. After a while hearing about Moth’s private life solely from the distorted point of view of these men becomes incredibly tiresome.
The film falters again as it similarly frames the aftermath of Moth being shot in the face by a sniper while on assignment almost solely through the lens of her lovers and the loss of her beauty. Here again the film relies on secondhand memories, rather than the wealth of interviews Moth made after her face was reconstructed and made the decision to go back to work. While Lawless’s attempt to thread together Moth’s personal and professional selves is admirable, there is a dissonance in tone that doesn’t quite work.
However, when the doc sticks to her coverage of Desert Storm, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide, and other geopolitical conflicts of the 1990s the film comes into sharper focus. Here Lawless uses Moth’s own footage on the ground, much of which aired on CNN, shaping the view of the atrocities of war for audiences across the globe. As her fellow CNN journalists describe covering the first armed conflicts where the press was actively targeted, it’s easy to see parallels to the situation in Gaza today. It’s hard to watch the footage she filmed of the IDF firing right at her car in Lebanon then later bomb a U.N. camp filled with Lebanese civilians, and realize that, despite her best efforts to document these horrors in real time so they wouldn’t happen again, history is repeating itself.
Who gets to shape, record, remember, and tell the stories from history is the subject of Johan Grimonprez’s searing video-essay “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.” Watching the doc evokes the same intellectual and visceral feeling one gets from reading a dense work of nonfiction, complete with a thick annotated bibliography.
Working with a team of editors Grimonprez’s film adapts three books: My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by activist and human rights advocate Andrée Blouin, Congo, Inc. by Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane, and To Katanga and Back: A UN Case History by Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien. The filmmaker deploys narrators to bring them to life like oral histories, while also using excerpts from the audio memoirs of Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev. These are then infused with home video footage, newsreels, text excerpts from newspapers, diplomatic correspondence, archival interviews, and footage and songs from African griots and American jazz musicians like Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Ornette Colman, Nina Simone, and Louis Armstrong.
All of this pieces together to form a Howard Zinn style people’s history of the formation of the Democratic Republic of Congo under the ill-fated Patrice Lumumba, his mission to create a United States of Africa, the way post-colonial nations in Africa were used as pawns by both U.S. and Soviet powers, how the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was in inexorably connected to geopolitics of post-colonial Africa, the Global South’s attempt to reject western influence as they joined the United Nations, and ultimately the collusion of western powers to back the first post-colonial coup in Africa in order to main control of the region’s mineral resources.
This sounds like a lot, and it is. Yet, somehow it never feels its 2.5-hour runtime. Slickly edited to the rhythms of the music featured, the film always remains gripping, its presentation of information easy to digest in large part due to the sleek graphics and titles designed in the style of newspaper headlines by Hans Lettany. While the film’s information may not be revelatory for those already familiar with the complex history of the region, for many it will be an eye-opener, especially when Grimonprez connects the dots from this seemingly distant midcentury conflict to the genocidal situation presently unfolding in the Congo over the coltan that powers the iPhone so many of us take for granted.
