Institute History
Description
"Mr. P's Dancing Sushi Bar" is not your "meat and potatoes" post-Vietnam war film. Shot on location in Los Angeles and Vietnam, Hirotaka Tashiro's film centers on African-American sushi bar chef Bruce McFee and his expatriate Japanese wife Mitsuko.
After Bruce loses his job as a sushi chef through what may or may not have been racism (he was the only black sushi chef at a Japanese-owned restaurant), he and Mitsuko decide to open up their own place. "Mr. P's Dancing Sushi Bar is a huge success, but it soon becomes apparent that the hard work and long hours the restaurant requires are just another excuse for Bruce not to deal with the past. It is twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, and Bruce still has nightmares about his actions overseas, while Mitsuko remains haunted by thoughts of the son and husband she abandoned for soldier Bruce two decades earlier. They decide to call it quits—both to the marriage and the sushi bar.
Bruce returns to Vietnam to face his demons. He begins to write to Mitsuko, and in a moving and vivid sequence, she arrives in Vietnam to find him. Together they travel through the sites of old wounds.
"Mr. P's Dancing Sushi Bar" is a charming and heartfelt new look at the effects of the Vietnam war on two people. Part comedy, part study of a marriage in trouble, part social commentary, "Mr. P.." quietly turns postwar trauma into an emblem for all issues from the past that must be revisited in order to move on.