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Fresh Kill (1994)
Director: Shu Lea Cheang
Producers: Jennifer Fong and Sharli Frilot
Length: 80 minutes
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Synopsis
Directed by Shu Lea Cheang, Fresh Kill centers around Shareen and Claire, an interracial couple living on Staten Island. Shareen works as a furniture mover and salvager while Claire works as a server at an upscale sushi restaurant with Shareen’s brother, Jiannbin, and their friend Miguel. A ragtag group of “hacktivists,” the friends work together to uncover a dark truth about the mega-corporation, GX, a famous cat food company that has been knowingly selling radioactive fish caught off the coast of Taiwan’s Orchid Island. The famed Staten Island Fresh Kills Landfill looms in the background, once the largest landfill in the world, poisoning the land and people. Much like Staten Island, Orchid Island serves as the nation’s nuclear waste dump. Claire and her friends work at a high-end sushi bar coveted by celebrities and businessmen alike. The patrons and chefs are not yet aware that the rare and expensive fish being served is the very same being used in GX’s cat food. All the while, Claire continues to bring home sushi from work for her daughter, Honey, whose favorite dish is “fish wasabi.” Consumption of this fish leads to a symptomatic green glowing followed by incoherent speech and finally, inexplicably vanishing into thin air. When Honey claims she glows, a worried Claire is quick to take her to specialist after specialist, none of whom can agree on what is wrong with Honey. Honey then disappears without a trace alongside some local cats, launching Shareen and Claire into a panicked search to no avail. At the same time, the group continues their hacktivist campaigns, hacking a local broadcasting network. Shareen begins to come to terms with the loss, trying to move forward while keeping the couple afloat with her salvaging business, but Claire can’t seem to accept that their daughter is gone forever. Honey eventually reappears, having spent the last ten days with Shareen’s father unbeknownst to Claire and Shareen.
Significance
Fresh Kill was an act of protest for Shu Lea Cheang and her band of AFAB compatriots, the first in a collection of feature films that Cheang describes as “Scifi New Queer Cinema” with her distinctive style of “eco-cyber-noia”. Cheang’s work always underscores a pressing social issue. In Fresh Kill, Cheang paints a dystopian landscape that juxtaposes the active destruction of two landscapes and communities. She blatantly calls out the greedy corporations that dump their waste on the lands of the poor and marginalized of society to turn a profit. However, she tactfully turns what would be a onesided problem into a universal emergency with the radioactive fish that poison not only the residents of Staten Island but also the rich patrons of the sushi bar, Naga Saki. Within the dystopian hellscape, there is still resistance. The film openly opposes conventions of family, heteronormativity, and sex. The characters are brother and sister, mother and father, parent and child without bearing any physical resemblance to one another. We meet a family of racially diverse backgrounds commonly united in their solidarity with one another, centering around two lesbians, one Brown and the other White, raising their Black daughter with no mention of a biological father. Fresh Kill decentralizes heterosexuality and skews the traditional conception of family, effectively subverting viewers’ expectations. Screenwriter, Jessica Hagedorn, writes the dialogue in such a way that prose, poetry, and business jargon flow together to create one cohesive world and story. During one particular moment, the moody but lovable poet of the friend group, Miguel, reads off J. L. Borges’ “Dreamtigers”, a nostalgic poem about being unable to conjure up the image of a tiger, a childhood obsession of Borges, in his dreams. The dialogue is overlaid with Jinnabin reading off a report stolen from GX’s database detailing their extensive research on the radioactive fish in their products. On one hand, Jinnabin is uncovering a harsh reality while on the other, Miguel’s reading suggests that even in dreaming, the world is not as we’ve imagined it. Throughout the film, there are glimpses of Orchid Island, a nod to Cheang’s Taiwanese heritage, where the aboriginal community suffers the consequences of Taiwan’s nuclear waste dumping. There are also short segments from Mimi, Claire’s Mom’s show, an amusing talk show commenting on local news like the Fresh Kills Landfill, and sexual safety and pleasure all simultaneously. Occasionally we catch a scene of businessmen openly admitting to the havoc GX has wrecked on the environment in the name of profit, a reversal of the idea of state surveillance, Claire. As an unknown channel surfer flits through these scenes we also catch the repetitive, ominous yet ambiguous advertisement from megacorporation, GX, “we care.” The whiplash as these scenes come in rapid succession. It’s reminiscent of the new age of cable TV, to access to more media than ever before, but find yourself in a state of brain rot, mindlessly scrolling through channels. At the time of its premiere at Berlinale in 1994, Fresh Kill was well-received albeit not the most popular film of its time. In 2023 ARTnews named the film one of the “100 Greatest New York City Artworks”. It premiered the remastered 35mm print in April of 2024 to mark its 30th anniversary. Cheang is currently touring across the US at various independent cinemas with a copy of the restoration (as of 2024). It is being praised as ahead of its time with younger audiences insisting that Fresh Kill is still relevant to their experiences.
The filmmaker: Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954)
Cheang graduated from New York University with an MA in Cinema Studies at a time when women were rarely seen behind the camera. She got her start in TV as a member of Paper Tiger Television, an independent broadcasting station committed to raising awareness for media literacy and promoting media accessibility. As an artist, Cheang first found success in an interactive video installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. The installation showed recordings of actors from inside a running washing machine, commenting on issues of race, assimilation, and gender. Living in NYC in the 1980s, Cheang bore witness to the atrocities of the AIDS crisis and like many other filmmakers at the time, took to the streets with a camcorder in hand to document the LGBT people’s movement. From her success in installation media, Cheang was able to raise the funds to get Fresh Kill off the ground. Cheang’s career continued to flourish post-production as she delved into the world of netspace and cyberspace. Her next large-scale project was Brandon, a web-based narrative project about the outing and murder of Brandon Teena, a trans man from Nebraska. Brandon was a part of the Guggenheim’s first web art collection, dealing with themes of gender expression and identity online. Following Brandon, Cheang began the process of directing her next film in Japan, I.K.U.. The film was loosely built around the world of Bladerunner, and is a Sci-fi porn film where cyborg dolls are sent out into the world to collect “orgasm data”. I.K.U. was created in response to heavy Japanese censorship of sex expression and genitalia despite the growing popularity of Japan’s porn industry. The reception was poor all around, and much of the audience at the Sundance Film Festival walked out at it’s premiere. The film was however the first pornographic film to stream at Sundance. Post 2000, Cheang continued her work in Europe, eventually becoming the first woman to represent Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Other notable works include the Locker Baby Project, a three-part work of interactive installations exploring the concept of clone babies in conjunction with technological advancement and intelligence. In 2024, Shu Lea C
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Further reading and listening
- Schleitwiler, Vince, Abby Sun, and Rea Tajiri. “Messy, Energetic, Intense: A Roundtable Conversation among New York’s Asian American Experimental Filmmakers of the Eighties with Roddy Bogawa, Daryl Chin, Shu Lea Cheang, and Rea Tajiri.” Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (Spring 2020): 66–78. doi:10.1525/FQ.2020.73.3.66.
- Furlong, Lucinda B. “Shu Lea Cheang’s Genre-Bending Affirmations.” Art Journal 54 (January 1995): 65–68. doi:10.1080/00043249.1995.10791722.