Internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang will visit the Ruth Sokolof Theater as part of her 21-city tour through the heartland of America. She will personally deliver a beautifully remastered 35mm print of her cyber-dystopian classic Fresh Kill to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its original release. For a new generation, the film remains a provocative and timely masterpiece, offering a unique vision that hasn’t lost any of its satiric, poetic, or political edge.
Join us for a pre-show reception catered by La Buvette in the Ruth Sokolof Theater lobby at 6 PM, followed by the screening at 7 PM. Stay afterward for an engaging conversation with Shu Lea Cheang and the two talented young filmmakers traveling with her, Jean-Paul Jones and Jazz Franklin, moderated by Peter Fankhauser.
Don't miss this incredible opportunity to experience this avant-anarcho eco-satire on the big screen and engage with some remarkable filmmakers!
About the Film
Fresh Kill is a highly stylized and satirical attack on neo-liberal reality. The child of a young lesbian couple living on Staten Island mysteriously vanishes after consuming radiated fish. The battle to find the missing child and the culprits responsible for the disappearance is joined by a group of cyber-warriors. Everyone finds themselves ensnared in a vast conspiracy involving a ghost ship of nuclear refuse, ominous media messages, and deadly cat food!
The film is directed by Shu Lea Cheang and stars Sarita Choudhury (recently appearing in acclaimed SHOWTIME series HOMELAND), Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim and Jose Zuniga.
The title Fresh Kill is inspired by the name of the world’s largest waste dump landfill on Staten Island, NYC. The original 35mm film premiered at Berlinale, Berlin Film Festival in 1994. The restored 35mm print is accomplished by the Fales Library & Special Collections of New York University with a National Film Preservation Fund grant under the technical supervision of BB Optics in New York City.
About Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker who engages in genre-bending, gender-hacking art practices. She drafts sci-fi narratives in film scenarios and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and an open network that permits public participation. Celebrated as a net art pioneer with BRANDON (1998 - 1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Cheang represented Taiwan with a mixed media installation, 3x3x6, at Venice Biennale 2019. Crafting her own genre of Sci-Fi New Queer Cinema, she has made four feature films, FRESH KILL(1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she receives the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. She is currently working on two major shows in 2025 - HAGAY DREAMING, a theatre performance for Tate Modern, and a survey show at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
This event is made possible with an LG Guggenheim 2024 Award granted to Shu Lea Cheang and generous support from participating cinemas and art centers across the USA.
About Jean-Paul Jones
Jean-Paul Jones is a recent filmmaking graduate from CalArts, Los Angeles. His creative focus explores the intricate intersection of religion and queerness. Passionate about challenging norms, Jean-Paul is particularly intrigued by the male gaze within the context of LGBTQ+ representation. His deep love for musicals serves as a driving force to reinvent the genre, using it as a powerful medium to delve into universal human themes.
About Jazz Franklin
Jazz Franklin is based in New Orleans and has a filmmaking praxis which plays with power and possibility. She has been working with Gallery of the Streets, which gathers a global network of artists, activists, and organizers to transform public and private spaces into temporary sites of resistance and “phantastical subversive imaginaries.” Since 2016, she has been a member of the programming team of the PATOIS, The New Orleans International Human Rights Film Festival.
About Peter Fankhauser
Peter Fankhauser is an artist, educator, and Co-Director at Amplify Arts, an Omaha area nonprofit that cultivates resources for artists working to incubate liberatory ideas across creative disciplines. Before joining the Amplify team, he held posts at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and The City University of New York, where he also received an MFA in interdisciplinary studio practice. In addition to his work at Amplify, Peter teaches courses in Photography and Visual Literacy at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. His own creative research seeks to create conditions for co-becoming by embracing interspecies kinships, queer ecologies, and wild futures.
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