Linda's Labyris Awards for
                Best Feminist Feature Films of 1992
                  The Women's Show, WMNF-FM, Tampa
                           January 2, 1993

  It's time once again to award Linda's Labyrises to the ten best
feminist films of the past year.  Again, I won't try to rank them
in any sort of hierarchical rank order; I'll just go down the
list alphabetically and give a brief description of the film and
what's feminist about it.  If you missed these films during the
year, you might want to save the list and look for them in the
video stores when we hit those inevitable stretches when there's
nothing in the theaters that a feminist would care to see.  So
here they are, the Labyris Award Winners of 1992:

   The Butcher's Wife.  A gentle, modern-day, romantic fairy-tale
that is lesbian-friendly and has some terrific blues numbers by,
of all people, Mary Steenbergen.

   Daughters of the Dust.  Julie Dash's long-awaited and
absolutely stunning evocation of Gullah women from the islands
off the Carolinas at the turn of the century.  Finally a feature
film by an African-American woman filmmaker about African-
American women.

   Fried Green Tomatoes.  A wonderful film about friendship as
exemplified by four women, Ninny and Evelyn who become friends in
an Alabama nursing home in the present, and Idgie and Ruth, whose
love for each other Ninny brings to life in her reminiscences of
the Depression-era town of Whistle Stop, Alabama.  From the novel
by Fannie Flagg.

   Gas Food Lodging.  Allison Anders wrote the screenplay and
directed this bittersweet, unvarnished depiction of life in a
small New Mexico desert truck-stop community as lived/struggled
through by a single waitress mother and her two teenage
daughters.  Low-budget, independent filmmaking at its best.

   A League of Their Own.  Finally what you might call a feminist
film by preeminent Hollywood woman director Penny Marshall.  This
was a great summer film all about the women's professional
baseball league that thrived from WWII into the 1950s.  It has
wonderful characters and it's great to see those beautifully
athletic women doing their thing.  Too bad that homophobic
Hollywood erased the historical fact that not all of the players
in this league were straight.

   Leaving Normal.  This tale of two women who leave Normal,
Wyoming heading for a new start in Alaska was blown off by the
critics as a "Thelma and Louise" look-alike, but it's far more
than that.  On the way they learn a lot about who they are and
what they really want from life as opposed to what's considered
"normal."  Nice performances by Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly.

   Raise the Red Lantern.  From a filmmaking standpoint this is
probably the best film on the list this year and it comes from,
of all places, The People's Republic of China.  It chronicles the
story of a young women student during the 1920s who, having
tasted freedom, then loses it when she is forced to become number
four wife to a rich merchant after her father suddenly dies.  A
vivid and moving portrayal from leading Chinese film actor Gong
Li and her director Zhang Yimou.

   Stepping Out.  From the people who brought us "Shirley
Valentine" this is a great woman-loving musical (a cross between
"Strangers in Good Company" and "Chorus Line") in which Liza
Minelli as the dance teacher and Shelley Winters as her crusty
accompanist whip an unlikely bunch of overage, underconfident,
women (and one man) into shape in time to perform for a holiday
benefit performance.  Great fun.

   This is My Life.  Writer Nora Ephron's directorial debut is a
film about a single mother of two teenage daughters who's an
aspiring stand-up comic and the conflicts between her own needs
and those of her children.  It's slick, ascerbic, and mostly
funny thanks to Julie Kavner's great performance as Dottie.

   Wisecracks.  Speaking of stand-up comics, this documentary by
Canadian filmmaker Gail Singer, is all about women stand-up
comics and is not only funny (because you get to hear lots of
their material in performance) but insightful because they take
time to talk about what it's like being a woman in that
quintessentially men's field.

   So there we have it, my list of the feminist films I most
enjoyed this past year.  Let's hope that 1993 brings even more
that I can recommend to you.