Wildrose

Director: John Hanson

1984 / 95min / 35mm

Describing the difficulties particular to women working traditionally male professions, Wildrose tells the story of June (Lisa Eichhorn), who faces grueling on-the-job conditions, exacerbated by her jeering all-male co-workers, when she takes a job as a truck driver and pit laborer at a strip mine in Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, following her divorce from an alcoholic ex. With a real feeling for the rough textures of small-town working-class life, this unadorned, tough-minded film from Hanson—Rob Nilsson’s co-director on the classic Northern Lights—follows willful June on a rocky road to independence, at the end of which she’ll find reason to question independence as an end in itself.

Q&A with John Hanson and Sandra Schulberg August 19