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