The Queen of Honky Tonk Speaks

A refusal to conform and to comply makes someone special, and Wanita is a woman who stands out from the rest. With her curly flame-red hair, fabulous technicolor fashions, voluptuous body and sultry voice, the Australian self-crowned “Queen of Honky Tonk” is a sight, and sound, to behold.

But audiences worldwide would have been oblivious to Wanita’s beauty and talent had it not been for fellow Aussie filmmaker Matthew Walker. Walker was approached by an old school friend of his, who had heard one of Wanita’s friends say at a party “crazy shit happens around her all the time, someone should be filming her!” So Walker’s friend called the filmmaker, Wanita’s connection gave them 1,500 Australian dollars, Walker made a short film at first, then embarked into the feature, I’m Wanita, which would go on to have its world premiere at this year’s HotDocs.

The film is clearly a labour of love, a documentary that cuts deep for anyone who has ever tried something and didn’t, at first, succeed. For the past twenty plus years, Wanita has been doing her best to survive in a world that simply wasn’t ready for her. She says often throughout the documentary that she was born in the wrong time, but really, she appears to have been born in the wrong country, as America, deep in the heart of country music, is where she best belongs.

In Walker’s intimate rockumentary, at first we watch Wanita at home, along with her Turkish husband—a sort of Mediterranean cowboy silent type who only speaks words of wisdom, in Turkish. At the end of the doc, there is a goosebumps moment about Baba, which you’ll have to watch the film to discover. Then Walker’s film quickly turns into Wanita’s quest to finally fulfill one of her dreams, to go to Nashville and record the ultimate country album. When she succeeds and makes it to America, it is in Nashville and also New Orleans where Wanita appears at her best, a mix of Janis Joplin’s incredible spirit and Stevie Nicks’s fashion sense—with her own unique twist thrown in. “A drunk Mother Theresa,” says Archer, one of her collaborators, a young man with a voice bigger than him whom Wanita picked up while he slept under a bridge.

There are many angles to Wanita’s story—she refers to herself as autistic and has no qualms mentioning her experiences as a prostitute. Mother, daughter, wife, country singer, survivor, and ultimately winner, Wanita is the kind of woman we all secretly wish we could be if only we had her guts.

Following is an exclusive interview with Wanita herself, accompanied by some pearls of wisdom from Walker chiming in. But a word of warning, this is not a PG interview.