This rarely-screened gem finally gets its due with a gorgeous, new restoration that demands to be seen on a big screen. Virtually unseen since its release in 1970, Wanda is an American indie masterpiece written and directed by Barbara Loden, a fierce filmmaking voice whose gift was only beginning to be realized. Experience this film and dream of what could have been. – JBFC Senior Programmer Andrew Jupin
With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden (Splendor in the Grass) turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid the soot-choked Pennsylvania industrial landscape—and shot in an intensely intimate cinema vérité style—the film follows 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, all while being callously mistreated by a series of men—including a small-time bank robber (Michael Higgins, The Conversation) who ropes her into his next scheme. A little-seen masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsized influence on generations of artists and filmmakers—including Isabelle Huppert, John Waters, and Barry Jenkins—Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.