Wanda

Director: Barbara Loden

1970 / 102min / DCP

“Groundbreaking American female filmmaker Loden’s lone feature was a vanguard work, a totally uncompromised writer-director-star turn in which she embodies a listless young mother in Pennsylvania coal country who drifts away from her domestic prison and shacks up with perhaps the least glamorous outlaw in cinema history, Michael Higgins’s cantankerous ‘Mr. Dennis.’ A deeply personal work by Loden, herself a child of poor Appalachia, an extraordinary clear-eyed expression of dead-end despondency, a life-marred document of a scuffed, sad, left-behind working-class world—and without question one of the greatest American films of the 1970s. Loden was unable to find backing for another film; she had wanted to adapt Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. With her one film, Wanda, she has become a symbol for overlooked, talented filmmakers who should have had the chance at a long lasting career. Loden died of cancer at the age of 48.” —Caryn Coleman, Film Programmer and Founder, The Future of Film is Female

Introduction by Caryn Coleman, Founder of The Future of Film is Female, on Friday, September 13th