Wanda is the only film by actress, screenwriter and director Barbara Loden (1932-1980), one of the most important works of New Hollywood cinema and almost forgotten for many years: After her divorce, which she accepts without resistance, Wanda lets herself drift, towards the small-time crook Mr. Dennis and onwards with him. Closeness develops - and disappears again. An anti-dramatic, unsentimental road movie, as precise as it is subtle in its depiction of the female perception of a male-dominated world. As a film made by a woman at the time, Wanda is a solitaire, the legacy and promise of a talent that never fully came to fruition.
“Wanda is a Polish woman's name. It is this name, the intimacy that resonates in the title, that aroused my curiosity. I read everything I could find about Barbara Loden and her movie. The movie is scary because it questions the family as the basis of society; the idea that individuals have to act in a rational and predictable way. Seen in this way, Wanda is also a film about the fragile hope for a different life, as Agnès Varda in Sans toit ni loi or Jane Bowles in her books also express.” (Adam Szymczyk)
