WANDA

PRESENTED BY THE PUBLIC

SAT/SUN SEPT. 15-16. 11:30 am

at NORTH PARK THEATRE

1970 / 102min / DCP

CAST: BARBARA LODEN, MICHAEL HIGGINS, DOROTHY SHUPENES, PETER SHUPENES

“‘I think that there is a miracle in Wanda,’ said Marguerite Duras of Barbara Loden’s 1970 directorial debut, the only film she would write and direct, and that she stars in too. Wanda is a woman who Loden once described as living ‘an ugly type existence,’ as a wife and mother who abandons her family (and herself too), in pursuit of what exactly? Some sense of self. She is a woman persuaded by what she doesn’t want, killing time and, as it happens, on the lam with a bank robber she barely knows.”—Durga Chew-Bose

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. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, 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, and callously mistreated by a series of men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. A rarely seen masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins. Courtesy Janus Films.

Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.