Fresh Kill

Is Fresh Kill a truly visionary work or has simply nothing changed in the last thirty years? The story of a young lesbian couple whose child suddenly vanishes after having accidentally been fed contaminated fish is even timelier now. They find the multinational corporation responsible for the pollution and set about exposing it using cyber-criminal tactics. Hacker vs. Big Tech has since turned into the new normal – it’s just that the cyber warriors still have a lot more winning to do for us poor folks. 

The campy look of some interior sets like the sushi shop or the shopping carts-filled room still feels, for all its 90s aura, funky and to the point, as it splendidly clashes with unsavoury exteriors from the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, NY. Generally speaking, Cheang's aesthetics of accelerated contrast still hits a nerve with as much spiked anger as it did back then. Cheang’s attacks on the neoliberal reality in Fresh Kill go into more depth than her films since, I.K.U. (2000) and UKI (2023) in particular. There is no future in which Fresh Kill would cease to be a proud piece of cinema!

– Olaf Möller