One of several films made by Susumu Hani in foreign locations about the experience of Japanese abroad, Bride of the Andes is set against the towering mountains and breathtaking landscapes of Peru. A cast of largely non-professional local actors is headed by Japanese actress Sachiko Hidari as Tamiko, the mail-order bride of Taro, a Peruvian-born Japanese. An ascetic, kindly but distant man, Taro has dedicated his life to improving the living conditions of the disenfranchised descendents of the Incas. Being his wife means being his partner in an arduous lifework to which Tamiko adapts with some difficulty. Japanese film historian Donald Richie calls Bride of the Andes “a remarkably fluid and open-ended film, very subtle, with no rounded edges.... Hani cuts very freely back and forth, sacrificing conventional continuity in order to achieve immediacy of effect and an overwhelming sense of empathy with his heroine....”