Wanda

Barbara Loden’s tough, austere portrait of an alienated woman adrift in Rust Belt America.

  • Director

    Barbara Loden

  • With

    Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Jerome Thier

  • USA 1970. 103min

  • Digital

  • Certificate

    15

Loden based her film on a 1960 news story about a female accomplice to a bank robbery who expressed gratitude to her judge for her jail sentence. What kind of woman could be ‘that passive and numb,’ Loden asked? A poetic, unsentimental film of unvarnished beauty, Wanda traces the itinerancy of its unforgetable anti-hero, played by Loden herself, who abandons her life as coalminer’s wife and wanders across the desolate landscapes and byways of an unseen America.

Contains sexual violence, domestic abuse.

The screening of Wanda on Tuesday 3 June 18:10 NFT1 will include an extended season introduction by Elena Gorfinkel.

The screening of Wanda on Saturday 7 June 18:00 NFT3 will be introduced by Jo Molyneux, BFI Archive Access Researcher.