Coming Soon
FRESH KILL
1994
Director
Shu Lea Cheang
Starring
Sarita Choudhury
Erin McMurtry
Abraham Lim
José Zúñiga
Laurie Carlos
Runtime
80 minutes
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The place is New York and the time is now. Raw fish lips are the rage on trendy menus across Manhattan. A ghost barge, bearing nuclear refuse, circles the planet in search of a willing port. Household pets start to glow ominously and then disappear altogether. The sky opens up and snows soap flakes. People start speaking in dangerous tongues.
Shu Lea Cheang’s visionary directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery. FRESH KILL tells the story of a young lesbian couple whose child suddenly vanishes after having accidentally been fed contaminated fish. They find the multinational corporation responsible for a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi and set about exposing it using the tactics of cyber-crime. A neon-green love letter to hacktivism, FRESH KILL conjures a trippy, extra-literary dimension, where Jorge Luis Borges’ search for his “Dreamtiger” intersects with lesbian-erotic flights into cyberspace.
“How do you live at the end of the world? What does living look like juggling multiple traumas, loss, systemic injustice, insurmountable grief, and the never-ending possibility, if not hope, for love? Artist-filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s FRESH KILL addressed many of these questions thirty years ago with the answer: chaotically. The nonsensical nature of the film mirrors the nonsensical reality drafted by capitalism. Rather than try to rationalize the system we live in, FRESH KILL meets its absurdity with glitches, formal and conceptual interruptions in the film and by extension the world as we know it. Cheang’s film is here to hack the communication system and tell you what it means to live.” - Ayanna Dozier
Shu Lea Cheang’s visionary directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery. FRESH KILL tells the story of a young lesbian couple whose child suddenly vanishes after having accidentally been fed contaminated fish. They find the multinational corporation responsible for a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi and set about exposing it using the tactics of cyber-crime. A neon-green love letter to hacktivism, FRESH KILL conjures a trippy, extra-literary dimension, where Jorge Luis Borges’ search for his “Dreamtiger” intersects with lesbian-erotic flights into cyberspace.
“How do you live at the end of the world? What does living look like juggling multiple traumas, loss, systemic injustice, insurmountable grief, and the never-ending possibility, if not hope, for love? Artist-filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s FRESH KILL addressed many of these questions thirty years ago with the answer: chaotically. The nonsensical nature of the film mirrors the nonsensical reality drafted by capitalism. Rather than try to rationalize the system we live in, FRESH KILL meets its absurdity with glitches, formal and conceptual interruptions in the film and by extension the world as we know it. Cheang’s film is here to hack the communication system and tell you what it means to live.” - Ayanna Dozier