Wanda

Directed by Barbara Loden | 103 minutes | 15+ | 55th Anniversary |

12:30pm Saturday, 28 June | static vision HQ

Buy Tickets ($17.50/$15) | Buy Day Pass ($65/$55)

A WOMAN STRUGGLING TO MAKE AN IDENTITY OF HER OWN

With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen even 55 years on.

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style on 16mm, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. A film of great miserable textures.

SIMILAR: the films of Kelly Reichardt, A Woman Under the Influence, Thelma and Louise, Five Easy Pieces

“I think that there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” - Marguerite Duras, writer of Hiroshima Mon Amour

"the new hollywood movement is for the girls too!" - mia lee vicino, Letterboxd

Country: United States
Year: 1970
Language: English