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Edition 2022
Films
Festivals and Awards:
Venice Film Festival 1970 - "Pasinetti" for Best Foreign Film
Crew:
Screenplay: Barbara Loden
Production: Harry Shuster, Barbara Loden
Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes
Production: Harry Shuster, Barbara Loden
Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes
With Wanda, filmed in cinema-verité style, on 16mm grained film, Barbara Loden signed one of the most important debut works of American independent cinema. This is the story of the unlikely partnership between a mining woman from Pennsylvania (embodied by the director herself), abandoned by her husband and the men she met adrift, and a bandit (Michael Higgins), by whom she lets herself be captivated. Defined, in Loden's own words, as an “anti-Bonnie and Clyde”, the film makes a radical revisionism of the road movie genre, giving it an austere and realistic tone. Vetted into obscurity for decades, despite critical enthusiasm, Wanda is an enigmatic, fascinating and utterly unique “character study”, that explores the gap between the public guilt and the unacceptance of personal guilt.
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Cast:
Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Jerome Thier -
Original Title:
Wanda -
Country:
United States of America -
Year:
1970 - 103' EN, Subtitles: PT
Festivals and Awards:
Venice Film Festival 1970 - "Pasinetti" for Best Foreign Film
Crew:
Screenplay: Barbara Loden
Production: Harry Shuster, Barbara Loden
Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes
Production: Harry Shuster, Barbara Loden
Cinematography: Nicholas T. Proferes
Director
Barbara Loden

Barbara Loden was born in 1932 in Marion, North Carolina. She was a Broadway Tony award-winning actress, model and film director. In 1970 she directed Wanda, becoming the first woman to write, direct, and star in her own independent film. The film was the only American film accepted to, and which won, the International Critics’ Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1970. In 2010, with support from Gucci, the film was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
Barbara Loden married Elia Kazan [director of On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955)] in 1967 and the couple stayed together until 1980, the year in which Loden died, a victim of cancer.
Barbara Loden married Elia Kazan [director of On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955)] in 1967 and the couple stayed together until 1980, the year in which Loden died, a victim of cancer.