Picture Bride (film)

Picture Bride is an American Japaneselanguage 1995 featurelength independent film directed by Kayo Hatta from a screenplay she cowrote with Mari Hatta, and coproduced 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. antimiscegenation laws, of mostly Japanese and Korean immigrant laborers in the United States using longdistance matchmakers in their homelands to find wives.

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 sugar cane plantation in Hawaii. The story begins with the death of Riyos father, which leads Riyos 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 husbandtobe 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.Riyo goes through with the wedding in a mass ceremony with other picture couples and travels out to the sugar plantation that is her new home. As she walks past the darkened fields to their ramshackle house, Riyo hears a faint sound on the wind of a woman singing. When she asks about it, Matsuji halfjokes that the ghosts of the canefields have come to welcome her. That night, they sleep on the same mat, but Riyo fights off his attempts at sexual intimacy and hides beneath a blanket. ........

Source: Wikipedia