Wanda (1970)

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With her first and only 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 sootchoked 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.