A disturbingly prescient ecofeminist parable and a brain-wave-scrambling cyberpunk fantasia, the debut feature from new-media pioneer Shu Lea Cheang merges a bold vision of resistance with an exuberant early-internet aesthetic. In a dystopian-chic New York where sushi joints and toxic-waste sites exist side by side, a lesbian couple (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) turn to the hacker underground to solve their daughter’s disappearance, in the process exposing a conspiracy involving corporate greenwashing and tainted fish. Swinging between outré satire and agitprop, Fresh Kill sounds the alarm about a capitalist system that pollutes everything from our waterways to our bodies to our minds.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K restoration, supervised and approved by director Shu Lea Cheang and director of photography Jane Castle, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
New interviews with Cheang and actor Sarita Choudhury
New program highlighting the 2024 theatrical rerelease of the film and Cheang’s self-distribution
Discussion with Cheang for the film’s thirtieth anniversary, moderated by scholar Jigna Desai, and presented by the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara
LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative profile of Cheang, recipient of the organization’s 2024 award for artist achievement
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by artist and technologist Mindy Seu
New cover by Jillian Adel
1310 Fresh Kill
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 8:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: 1310 Fresh Kill
Excellent! I can retire my recorded from television VHS copy of this film the occurred in Channel 4's 1995 "Dyke TV" season (Which itself appears to have been Channel 4 in the UK highlighting the extant Lesbian-American community TV show), which has been the only UK television screening of this film to date.
The big films of that season were Go Fish, Desert Hearts and this one, so Criterion has tackled two out of the three now! Fresh Kill is kind of doing the same thing as Welcome II The Terrordome does (or the recent Zero), in presenting an arch (perhaps too arch with its post-RoboCop and Wayne's World satirical take on commercials and public access TV) sci-fi dystopian world to act as a soundboard for its radical political polemics. Or to use a more modern analogy, its perhaps the mid-point between Repo Man and We're All Going To The World's Fair. But certainly one of the more left field entries in both sci-fi and gay cinema of the era.
(And this may work well in a rather charmingly dated cyber-futurist 90s double bill with 1995's Hackers, when you can imagine that these are the more deadly serious militant activist contingent occupying the warehouse loft converted apartments just one block down from Johnny Lee Miller and co larking about whilst playing video games and hacking the world!)
The big films of that season were Go Fish, Desert Hearts and this one, so Criterion has tackled two out of the three now! Fresh Kill is kind of doing the same thing as Welcome II The Terrordome does (or the recent Zero), in presenting an arch (perhaps too arch with its post-RoboCop and Wayne's World satirical take on commercials and public access TV) sci-fi dystopian world to act as a soundboard for its radical political polemics. Or to use a more modern analogy, its perhaps the mid-point between Repo Man and We're All Going To The World's Fair. But certainly one of the more left field entries in both sci-fi and gay cinema of the era.
(And this may work well in a rather charmingly dated cyber-futurist 90s double bill with 1995's Hackers, when you can imagine that these are the more deadly serious militant activist contingent occupying the warehouse loft converted apartments just one block down from Johnny Lee Miller and co larking about whilst playing video games and hacking the world!)