Picture Bride (film)
| Picture Bride | |
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| Directed by | Kayo Hatta |
| Produced by | Diane Mark and Lisa Onodera |
| Written by |
Kayo Hatta Mari Hatta |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Mark Adler |
| Cinematography | Claudio Rocha |
| Edited by | Lynzee Klingman |
| Distributed by | Miramax |
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Release date
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Running time
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95 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English Japanese |
| Box office | $1,238,905 |
Picture Bride is an American Japanese-language 1995 feature-length independent film directed by Kayo Hatta from a screenplay she co-wrote with Mari Hatta, and co-produced by Diane Mei Lin Mark and Lisa Onodera. It follows Riyo, who arrives in Hawaii as a "picture bride" for a man she has never met before. The story is based on the historical practice, due to U.S. anti-miscegenation laws, of (mostly) Japanese and Korean immigrant laborers in the United States using long-distance matchmakers in their homelands to find wives.
Released by Miramax Films, the film stars Youki Kudoh, Akira Takayama, Tamlyn Tomita, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, with a special appearance by Toshiro Mifune in his penultimate film role. Picture Bride premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for narrative feature film. Considered a landmark Asian American work, the film was an Official Selection at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Feature (for director Hatta). In 2004, Miramax released a DVD version, which includes "The Picture Bride Journey," a documentary on the making of the film featuring the director, cast members, archival historical footage, and behind-the-scenes clips from the movie set.
The film is set in 1918. Riyo (Kudoh) is a "city girl", who becomes a picture bride to a man who works as a field hand on a sugarcane plantation in Hawaii. The story begins with the death of Riyo's father, which leads Riyo's aunt to make arrangements for Riyo to become a picture bride. As Riyo prepares to be photographed, her aunt shows her a picture of the handsome Matsuji (Takayama), her husband-to-be in Hawaii. The photo intended as introduction and as a means of confirming that each has found the right partner when they meet for the first time on the docks. When Riyo finally arrives in Honolulu, the man who comes to greet her looks nothing like the one in the photo. Matsuji confesses that the photo he sent was old, taken when he was a young man.
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