Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: Fresh Kill (in 35mm)
- Tuesday, October 15, 2024 / 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 35mm film (80 minutes)
- With Shu Lea Cheang (filmmaker)
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Screenplay: Jessica Hagedorn
Starring: Sharita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim, Jose Zuniga, Will Kempe, and Nelini Stamp
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. It 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 traveled 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 joined moderator Jigna Desai (Center for Feminist Futures, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion.
Biographies
Director/producer 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 scenario and artwork imagination. She builds social interface with transgressive plots and open network that permits public participation. Cheang was celebrated as a net art pioneer with Brandon (1998 – 1999), the first web art commissioned and collected by the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She represented Taiwan with her mixed media installation 3x3x6 at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Crafting her own genre of Scifi New Queer Cinema, she has made four feature films: Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), FLUIDø (2017) and UKI (2023). In 2024, she received the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Award. She is currently at work on two major shows for 2025: a theater performance for the Tate Modern entitled Hagay Dreaming, and a survey show at Haus der Kunst in Munich.
Moderator Jigna Desai (Center for Feminist Futures, UCSB)
Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies and the director of the Center for Feminist Futures. She is the author of Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (Routledge 2004) and co-editor of several collections including Bollywood: A Reader (Open University 2009) and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (University of Illinois Press 2013). She is a promiscuous interdisciplinary and dis-disciplinary scholar who researches and teaches feminist speculative fiction and film.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the Center for Feminist Futures.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.