
With her first and only film-a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in - Barbara Loden turned in a ground-breaking 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, where she falls prey to a series of callous men-including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme.
A difficult-to-see 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.
Wanda is given the Criterion treatment and released on Blu-ray 17th May April 2023 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
- New 2K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and Gucci, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- I Am Wanda, an hour-long documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring an interview with director Barbara Loden filmed in 1980
- Audio recording of Loden speaking to students at the American Film Institute in 1971
- Segment from a 1971 episode of The Dick Cavett
- Show featuring Loden
- The Frontier Experience, a short educational film from 1975 about a pioneer woman's struggle to survive, directed by and starring Loden
- Trailer
- An essay by film critic Amy Taubin
Please note - Disc special features are subject to change, may differ from format to format and/or may differ from region to region.
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