TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Escapes

Wanda

Barbara Loden
1970 - United States - 1h42

Screenings : wednesday 24 - 4:15 pm - Pathé - 1 - presented and followed by a debate with the film directors and Toki Pilioko - actors

Wanda Goronski can no longer put up with the miserable conditions she lives in. Sacked from the factory she worked in, she decides to leave her husband, a miner, and their two children without looking back. This marks the start of Wanda's resourceless trek through the city, where she hooks up with Norman Dennis, a seedy traveling salesman who makes ends meet by stealing.

Wanda is the only feature directed by the all too rare actress Barbara Loden, revealed by her husband Elia Kazan's Wild River. She drags the viewer into a hell filmed in the mining region of Pennsylvania. Marguerite Duras praised the film and saw Loden's potential at the time saying “I think that there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually there is a distance between the representation and the text, and the subject and the action. Here this distance is totally removed, there is an immediate and definitive coincidence between Barbara Loden and Wanda.” The film, inspired by a story about a couple of sleazy criminals, reflected, according to Loden, some of her own states of mind: the indifference of the world, abnegation, silence..

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier
Screenplay : Barbara Loden
Cinematography : Nicholas T. Proferes
Sound : Lars Hedman
Editing : Nicholas T. Proferes

Production : Foundation for Filmakers

French distributor : Les Films du Camélia