Wanda (Blu-ray)

With her first and only film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a ground-breaking 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 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.

• New 2K digital restoration by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, The Film Foundation, and Gucci, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• 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 of The Dick Cavett Show featuring Loden
• The Frontier Experience (1975), a short educational film about a pioneer woman’s struggle to survive, directed by and starring Loden
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Amy Taubin