The Film Co-Operative

Logline:

 A widowed rancher, hoping to find happiness again, imports a younger bride from Belarus who is eager to start a new life in America and escape her abusive pimp, but is jailed for her murder when her pimp shows up hoping to steal his wealth and reclaim his girl.

Synopsis:

 Newly widowed Pete Wells, 67, a Nebraska cattle rancher, is devastated, sad and lonely after the sudden and unexpected death of his beloved wife. Richard, his grown son, a successful NY executive with no interest in taking over the family farm, is in town for the funeral, but leaves soon after. Pointing out the lack of suitable local female companionship, his best friends, Jane Duffy who runs the local bar and Sheriff Duffy, urge him to go online and start dating. They show him a website that packages tours to Eastern Europe to meet attractive marriageable young women. He corresponds with Oksana, a lovely woman from Minsk who strikes his fancy and they plan to meet. Oksana, a pretty, shapely and insecure blonde 30-something lives with Maxim, a brutal abusive hard-drinking pimp, who exploits her. He uses her to bilk lonely single men both online at a Bride Dating website and at glitzy, garish disco clubs which feature dozens of pretty local women offering themselves up to the desperate, unattractive older foreign men who’ve traveled there on tour packages seeking love, to satisfy their lust or maybe find a willing subservient wife for a certain price. Her family has ostracized her, calling her a whore. 

Pete travels to Belarus and they hit it off. She comes back to his farm with him and they find happiness: glad to be free of her miserable pimp, she dotes on Pete and relishes the beauty of farm work and life; he is no longer sad and lonely and has a renewed zeal for life. They get married but one day when Pete is away at a cattle auction for which he has taken out a large loan, Maxim, whom she snuck out on and has been avoiding, arrives at the farm. In a fit of jealous rage, he accidentally kills Oxana and frames the murder to look like Pete killed her. With the manipulated evidence Maxim left, Sheriff Duffy has no choice but to arrest Pete, although he knows his friend is innocent. Richard flies out from NY to assist his dad. Police investigation begins to turn up clues: a foreign brand cigarette butt with unknown DNA, a stolen car from a nearby airport, an airline travel record and a mysterious transfer from Pete’s bank account to an unknown Paypal account. Thinking the money might be going to Oksana’s mother in Minsk, Richard flies out to question her family. Her brothers and mother know nothing about the money but volunteer that it’s more likely going to Maxim. They take him to the bar disco where Maxim operates and the owner leads them to Maxim’s apartment where the local police arrest him for Oksana’s murder. Pete is set free, but with the money Maxim stole and the new loan, he sadly faces the loss of his beloved farm