Join us as THE PUBLIC presents Janus Films’s 4K restoration of Barbara Loden’s long-neglected feminist masterpiece, WANDA (1970), ahead of its Criterion release later this year!
Featuring morning baked goods from Butter Block.
Programmed by Caitlin Coder, THE PUBLIC.
Tickets are $10.50 at the door or online here:
SAT September 15th at 11:30 AM
SUN September 16th at 11:30 AM
“‘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
“A pioneer female filmmaker, Loden was working without a net, without role models, without a network of female collaborators (‘sisterhood’ was not invented then), in a void. Of her lonely fight, we know practically nothing, for she was shy and found it difficult to express herself, especially in public and in interviews. What we know of her life has been recounted by her male collaborators, so it is in the fictions she wrote we must look for her true voice.” — Bérénice Reynaud
Barbara Loden brought that 🔥👌🏿 https://t.co/w4pXnCgiqv
— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) August 20, 2018
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. (Janus Films)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by The Film Foundation and GUCCI.
