patois film festival

Fresh Kill (1994)

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Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene.  You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution.  Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance.  That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine.  At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date.  Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming.  Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap.  The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.

The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed.  At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble.  The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of.  It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch.  The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant.  They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear.  In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”).  The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).

One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows.  It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives.  The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX.  There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.”  Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A.  Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging.  Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.

The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans.  The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania.  The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag.  It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously.  Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste.  A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon.  Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering.  Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.

-Brandon Ledet

Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena, 1973)

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Although it’s been an annual occurrence on the local calendar for the last fifteen years, 2019 was the first year I attended PATOIS: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival. I only caught four screenings over two days at the fest, but it was a rewarding, energizing mix of political activism, queer community organizing, and avant-garde art that’s left a major impact on how I’ve been thinking about the purpose & boundaries of cinema in the weeks since. A lot of that political stimulation & intellectual contextualization stemmed from the activists tabling in the lobby, the panelists who hosted post-screening Q&As, and the organizers’ own pre-screening acknowledgements to the Indigenous Peoples whose land the festival, and by extension modern New Orleans, occupies. Of course, it was also largely due to the proper cinematic experience afforded to the often-underserved figures represented in the films themselves – funk pioneer Betty Davis, trans activist Marsha P. Washington, the anonymous women of Zambian labor camps, etc. Of the few films I saw at this year’s festival, none benefited from the big-screen theatrical treatment quite as much as the 1970s Senegalese road trip movie Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena in English). While not as much of an overt, explicit call-to-arms in its politics as other activist selections at the fest, Touki Bouki was the screening that most benefited from the sensory immersion of the theatrical experience. If I had seen Toki Bouki at home, I would have assumed that I missed something that explained the disoriented, illogical patterns of its storytelling in a moment when my attention wandered. Seeing it undistracted at PATOIS, I was still super confused & disoriented by its disinterest in A-B logic, but pleasantly so.

To call Touki Bouki a “road trip movie” is more a nod to the listless, episodic nature of its storytelling than it is reflective of its characters’ trajectory. Mory, an ox-herder, and Anta, a politically active college student, scheme throughout the film on how to grift enough money to fund an escape to Paris. It’s a mission that requires them to travel all over Senegal to attack their lack of funds from multiple angles (mainly petty theft). Josephine Baker’s romantic chorus of “Paris, Paris, Paris” serves as a rallying cry in this escapist mission, just one of the many notes of repetition that defines the cyclical rut the characters are stuck in. The most confounding of these cycles is the repeated fracturing of its timelines. Cross-cut with absolutely horrific footage of oxen being led to slaughter in a real-life abattoir, we repeatedly see Mory meet a deadly end before he can manufacture his Parisian escape. The nature of his fated death varies as the film sprawls into both documentarian observation & total detached fantasy: motorcycle crash, suicide, murder, etc. Its fractured, sensory-driven narrative has a clear surrealist bent to its sensibilities, but its editing room tinkering is almost outright Cubist: dissecting the same events repeatedly from multiple angles to establish a scattered, but more accurate truth. This is the story of a romantic dreamer who is not nearly as slick as he believes himself to be and is doomed to a violent death no matter how grand or wistful his ambitions of Parisian escape become. It’s a road trip movie where the trip itself is an impossibility – not only because no roads lead from Senegal to France, but because the only ultimate destination for flames that burn this brightly is a young death. Yet, it stubbornly carries on like a carefree road trip movie anyway, having fun sightseeing, posing fashionably, and meeting outlandish characters on the journey to its grim, cyclical destination.

There’s a kind of kinship between Touki Bouki and the 1966 Senegalese labor drama Black Girl; both films adopt filmmaking sensibilities from the French New Wave only to weaponize them against their own audience. The clearest this parallel shines through is in Touki Bouki’s third act, when white French colonialists on a ship in port complain about the loyalty & dignity of Senegalese servants, entirely unaware of how abhorrent they sound. The difference is that Black Girl overtly pursues this anti-French-Intellectuals perversion of French New Wave aesthetics for its entire runtime, whereas Touki Bouki is much looser in its narrative & messaging. In that way, Black Girl would almost be the more obvious choice for PATOIS programming (and for all I know, it has been included in the festival’s past). Touki Bouki is less overtly interested in politically subverting the French New Wave and often instead borrows the psychedelic Cool of that movement’s intense cinematography & sound design to create something unique, something distinctly Senegalese. Its fractured, psychedelic road trip creates a visual language & narrative pattern entirely of its own, which has made the film itself substantial standout outside any context of a cinematic movement. Its expansive palette allows for emotional peaks as varied as passionate sex, shit jokes, elaborate fantasies of wealth, graphic documentation of animal slaughter, and broad slapstick humor. Its own iconography has persisted so conspicuously that the cowskull-adorned motorcycle that facilitates Mory & Anta’s journey was even referenced in the promotional materials for Beyoncé & Jay-Z’s recent “On the Run” tour. Maybe that’s where its political activism lies: establishing a new cinematic aesthetic that’s distinctly black, African, and cerebral. Regardless, I’m very much appreciative that it landed on the PATOIS lineup so I could see it blown up loud and in the dark, fully immersed in its Cubist fantasy realm.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week (PATOIS Film Fest Edition) 3/21/19 – 3/27/19

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The Broad Theater is the MVP in local cinema this week (as they often are), hosting the 15th year of PATOIS: The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival. According to the festival’s official listing, PATOIS will “include new and classic fiction films from Senegal and Zambia, experimental short films from New Orleans, and documentaries highlighting social issues concerning law enforcement violence, immigration, transgender liberation, and gay refugees from Syria. Countries featured in this year’s festival include Palestine, Senegal, Syria, Zambia, Greece, Turkey, and the United States.”

Here are the few screenings at PATOIS we most recommend, as well as a few other films you should seek out on New Orleans big screens this week.

PATOIS Film Festival Selections at The Broad

Touki Bouki (1973) – “A pair of lovers, Mory and Anta, fantasize about fleeing Dakar for a mythic and romanticized France. The film follows them as they try to scavenge and hustle the funds for their escape. A 1973 classic of African Cinema, Touki Bouki conveys and grapples with the hybridization of Senegal.” Screening Sunday 3/24 at 4:30pm. 

I Am Not a Witch (2018) – “When 9-year old orphan Shula is accused of witchcraft, she is exiled to a witch camp run by Mr. Banda, a corrupt and inept government official. A hit at over 50 international festivals, I Am Not A Witch is a must-see for anyone interested in new African Cinema and contemporary female filmmakers.” Screening Saturday 3/23 at 5pm.

Betty: They Say I’m Different (2018) – “Explosive 1970s funk pioneer Betty Davis changed the landscape for female artists in America. She was the first, as former husband Miles Davis said, Madonna before Madonna, Prince before Prince. An aspiring songwriter from a small steel town, Betty arrived on the 70s scene to break boundaries for women with her daring personality, iconic fashion and outrageous funk music. […] Creatively blending documentary and animation this movie traces the path of Betty’s life, how she grew from humble upbringings to become a fully self-realized black female pioneer the world failed to understand or appreciate. After years of trying, the elusive Betty, forever the free-spirited Black Power Goddess, finally allowed the filmmakers to creatively tell her story based on their conversations.” Screening Sunday March 24 at 7pm.

New Queer Stories – “Short films by queer and trans people of color.” Screening Saturday 3/23 at 7pm.

Other Films Screening in New Orleans

Us –Jordan Peele follows up his instantly iconic debut feature Get Out (Swampflix’s favorite film of 2017) with what looks to be a surreal freak-out about doppelgangers & bunny rabbits.

Climax – Gaspar Noé’s best film to date is an over-the-top arthouse horror about a group of contemporary dancers whose wrap party turns violent when someone among them spikes the sangria with an overdose of LSD. This movie is as #edgy & obnoxious as anything else Noé has ever done, but it also features more death drops than Paris is Burning, so it’s an automatic A+. Playing only at The Broad & AMC Elmwood

Cruel Intentions (1999) – Returning to theaters for a single-week run to commemorate its 20th anniversary, this Dangerous Liaisons riff sparked the mildly-kinky sexual awakening of countless Millennials in my exact age range (not to mention converting us into hopeless, lifelong Placebo fans).

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) – The Old Hollywood staple that made James Dean a star and sold millions of dorm room posters everywhere. Screening Sunday 3/24 and Wednesday 3/27 as part of Prytania’s Classic Movies series.

-Brandon Ledet