Film Screening: Panic!: Fresh Kill (in 35mm)

Fresh Kill (1994) has been heralded as visionary, avant-anarcho ecosatire. The film envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture. The film centers on two young lesbian parents caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. 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 and remains a seminal film at the intersections of environmental and social justice.

Thirty years after the film’s release, Fresh Kill has been remastered by the Fales Library & Special Collections of New York University. Fresh Kill director/producer Shu Lea Cheang is traveling with filmmakers Jean-Paul Jones and Jazz Franklin on a nationwide roadtrip to screen the remastered 35mm print of the film at independent arthouse cinemas across the country, and to engage local communities on issues of environmental racism and activist resistance. Shu Lea Cheang will join moderator Jigna Desai (Center for Feminist Futures, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.