Wanda

Content:

The only feature film by director and leading actress Barbara Loden tells the story of a woman's life in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania. When she meets a petty criminal in a bar, her life takes a momentous turn. A mixture of road movie, thriller and western drama - and a milestone in feminist film that will be shown in German cinemas for the first time in 2026, more than 50 years after it was made.

Introduction (English): Elena Gorfinkel (King's College London)

Background:

Film series: Hinterlands of Modernity. Infrastructure Scenes/Film
Since the beginning of cinema, films have repeatedly staged major infrastructure systems. Countless works deal with railroads, harbors, raw material extraction, cars, ships or telephones. This series focuses on a specific facet of the cinematic examination of infrastructures: the displaced social spaces, newly emerging wastelands, niches and peripheries, in short: the "hinterland" that modern infrastructures of the 20th century have created. Four films are dedicated to this other side of our infrastructural modernity, which can be observed in very different regions: in a major European city, in the US Rust Belt, on the Chilean Pacific coast and on the Chinese Yangtze River. The films will be presented by experts and then discussed together. The series accompanies a master's seminar on infrastructures in film at the Ruhr University Bochum.