Film Screening: Fresh Kill

×

Expand

Shu Lea Cheang, “Fresh Kill,” 1994

film still (courtesy of the Gallery)

In collaboration with the UBC Film Society and in tandem with the exhibition An Opulence of Squander curated by Weiyi Chang, we are pleased to screen Fresh Kill on the Belkin's Outdoor Screen, a 1994 feature-length experimental film by Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang. Bring your chair or some blankets and get comfortable for this outdoor screening!

Fresh Kill (1994, 35 mm), coined as an eco-cybernoia film and an avant-anarcho ecosatire, envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture. "Kill" is Dutch for stream, Fresh Kill tells the story of two young lesbian parents caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. 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. A riveting and densely packed film, Fresh Kill evokes the furious rhythms of channel surfing with its rapid-fire editing style.

Thirty years after its premiere at Berlinale Berlin Film Festival in 1994, Fresh Kill has now been remastered by the Fales Library & Special Collections of New York University. The 2024 release of Fresh Kill was premiered at the [Reclaim] International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2024 and the US premiere took place at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in April 2024. Since its release in 1994, Fresh Kill has been celebrated and embraced by a generation of young audiences internationally.