New Arrival Wanda (#965)

With her first and only feature filma hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred inBarbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vrit 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 menincluding a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers,Wandais a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on societys margins.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 2K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and Gucci, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• I Am Wanda,an hour-long documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring an interview with director Barbara Loden filmed in 1980
• Audio recording of Loden speaking to students at the American Film Institute in 1971
• Segment from a 1971 episode ofThe Dick Cavett Showfeaturing Loden
• The Frontier Experience(1975), a short educational film about a pioneer womans struggle to survive, directed by and starring Loden
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin

New cover by Eric Skillman