Conversation with Lucy Craft: A Journalist’s Odyssey into Documentary Film

Based in Tokyo, Lucy has covered Japan for American and international newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV since 1982, working for NPR, PBS, BBC, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, among many others. As a producer and correspondent for CBS News, she won an Emmy and two nominations.

A chance conversation led Lucy to team up with two colleagues, co-directing a short documentary about the hidden lives of their mothers. Named for a Japanese motto about perseverance, "Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides" premiered on BBC World Television in 2015. The enormous literature unearthed since that first project sparked the creation of a downloadable, public school curriculum in collaboration with Stanford University, and a three-year, nationwide war bride exhibition, in conjunction with the Smithsonian, opening Dec. 14 in Irving, Texas. Lucy is now editing a second, feature-length documentary on the war brides, describing the extraordinary alchemy that made the marriages possible, and how the women fit into the racially charged society of the 1950s. In this event, Lucy Craft will discuss her career journey and how her
journalism work informs her documentary work. Her conversation will be followed by a screening of her short documentary and a panel discussion with Dr. Karen Kuo, Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation.

Dr. Kuo’s research and expert range includes literary and cinematic studies and social and cultural theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her book, "East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America" (Temple University Press), examines the
geopolitical imaginaries of US orientalism in film and literature during the interwar period.