Wanda (played by Barbara Loden herself) lives with her husband and two children in a shack in a bleak coal-mining region. Because she neglects the housework, her husband files for divorce. Wanda abandons her former life, relinquishes custody of her children — “they are better off with him” — loses her job, and drifts alone through impoverished Pennsylvania. When she meets a small-time crook in a bar, she lets herself be drawn into a bank robbery. Barbara Loden’s unsentimental directorial debut remained her only feature film and is now regarded as one of the most important works of 1970s American independent cinema. “The miracle, for me, lies not in the way she acts but in the fact that in the film […] she is even more herself than she must have been in life […]. I insist on this because it deeply moved me. It is as though, in the film, she achieves a kind of sacralization of what she wants to show as a state of decay, but which, I believe, is something magnificent — a very, very strong, very intense, and very profound radiance.” (Marguerite Duras)

Loan of the film print with kind support of Arsenal - Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V..