The director’s mastery of trashy, low-budget exploitation films like It’s a Bikini World and Group Marriage turned her into a cult icon. Now, aged 88, she’s finding out they’re more relevant than everStephanie Rothman first came across the term “exploitation” in a review of one of her own films. It was 1970, and her second solo-directed feature, The Student Nurses, a small-budget indie about trainees at an inner-city hospital, set against Los Angeles’s bubbling counterculture, was doing well at the US box office. (It eventually made more than $1m from a $150,000 budget.) Rothman was pleased but the review took her aback. It called it an “exploitation film” with “surprising depth”.Fifty-five years on and Rothman is a cult legend who fully embraces the label. “I started out with a very snobbish attitude,” she says on a video call from California. “I was shocked that’s what I was making! But as time went on, I began to appreciate what I was able to do, which was to take elements of pop...