Interview: "Fresh Kill" director Shu Lea Cheang
"We lost the internet in terms of how it has become so commercial. We signed away our own data."
A prescient ecofeminist parable about the dangers of capitalism as it leaks into every facet of our lives, Taiwanese-American new-media pioneer, artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang’s Fresh Kill is as much revelation today as it was when it was first released over thirty years ago.
Set in an ever-so-sightly dystopian bent on post-Reaganomics era New York City, the film follows a lesbian couple (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) whose child has disappeared after eating some tainted fish, as well as two restaurant workers, and sometime hackers, (Abraham Lincoln Lim and José Zúñiga), who are fighting against the new Fresh Kills landfill, which has turned the surrounding area into a veritable wasteland. Along with these main characters, the film is full of digs at yuppie culture, corporate greenwashing, and a pitch-black satire that examines the way that unchecked, unregulated capitalism is eating away at our world, our bodies, and our minds.
Over Zoom, I spoke with Cheang about the film’s new 4K restoration and its recent release on home video by the Criterion Collection, casting from the downtown New York scene, and why the film is still so eerily relevant today.
