Wanda

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 characterseldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape,and shot in an intensely intimate ve'rite' 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 criminalscheme. A rarely seen masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted anoutsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, Wanda is acompassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society's margins.