“They flew away, out of this world and into the mass unconscious. Women who are completely free from all the shackles that restrain them have no place in this world. The world is not big enough to support them.”

Callie Khouri, screenwriter of Thelma and Louise.

Sisterhood, sacrifice, female friendship and solidarity all in one of the greatest road trip movies ever. An icon of early 90’s cinema, Ridley Scott’s visionary feminist fable appeals to the outlaw in all of us.

When put-upon housewife Thelma (Geena Davis) persuades her friend Louise (Susan Sarandon), a tough cafe waitress, to take off from their small Arkansas town in Louise's 1966 Thunderbird to escape her sexist husband, it’s under the guise of a weekend fishing trip. But when after stopping at a bar along the way, Louise ends up saving Thelma from an attempted rape – shooting and killing the rapist in the process. In the firm (and not unreasonable) belief that a Texan jury would assume that a woman who decides to flirt is a woman that will also consent to sex, they are forced instead to go on the run. Along the way adding armed robbery, the kidnapping of a policeman and destruction of property to that possible murder charge, the pair find their new found assertiveness leaves them feeling strangely liberated, leading to a euphoric final act of resistance.

Thelma and Louise does not set out as a road movie, it becomes one. It revitalised the genre, re-working its masculine image, that in turn inspired a fresh new wave of road films. Its blend of hitherto unrelated genres, coupled with its exploration of female agency in a hostile southern landscape, was an all too rare depiction of female liberation that – seen today 25 years later - feels as urgent and relevant as ever.

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