Eco-Activist SCI-FI COMEDY!

Multimedia artist and digital pioneer, Shu Lea Cheang brings her radical experimental vision to a viciously political and campy narrative of two young lesbian parents who fight against environmental racism in the form of radioactive fish lips. Named for the actual Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, Fresh Kill (1994) is a playful, sci-fi romp that fantasizes an eruption of the oft-times obscured mechanics of environmental racism into plain view, connecting the real landfill on Staten Island to the radioactive dump sites on Orchid Island with the delirium of greenwashing and public relations. 

Produced nearly thirty years ago, Fresh Kill is presciently relevant to the questions we are grappling with today around unchecked corporate power, industry’s destabilizing impact on global ecosystems, and the unequal distribution of that harm onto communities that are already grappling with poverty and political disenfranchisement. Beautifully shot in candy colored 35mm, the collaged style of the film intercuts lampooned TV commercials, hacked pirate broadcasts, and sweet filmic depictions of care in queer family. Through these juxtapositions Chaeng explores media as both a mechanism of control and a potential tool of protest and change. A punk ethos of rebellion and fun rules throughout, while a hyper-anesthetized and surreal theatricality belies the director’s fine art origins.

The first feature length film by Taiwanese-American director Shu Lea Cheang, who has since gone on to represent Taiwan in the 2018 Venice Biennale. A self described “digital nomad” Cheang’s work takes on racism, sexual politics, and the social impacts of media technologies. A forerunner in the field of net art, she has forged a genre-defying art practice blending film, software, and interactive performance. Her work BRANDON, memorializing Brandon Teena, a transgender man murdered in Nebraska in 1993 when his killers discovered his anatomical gender, was the first piece of web art commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum.

The Backlot Cinema Layout & Tickets: *attendance enters you into a raffle to win gift certificates to local businesses! We encourage our guests to come as if to a picnic – so bring your own blankets, cushions or folding chairs to sit – you want to be comfortable so bring all the coziness you need! Bar and local food vendors on site. Restrooms provided. In the case of rain the event will be moved into our Sanctuary, which will have socially distanced seating and co-vid precautions in place.