Fresh Kill

Director: Shu Lea Cheang 
Cast: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim
USA, 1994, 78', color
English with Turkish subtitles

Shu Lea Cheang's witty narrative Fresh Kill envisions a post-apocalyptic landscape strewn with electronic detritus and suffering the toxic repercussions of mass marketing in a high-tech commodity culture.

Fresh Kill's title refers to a fictitious landfill that dominates Staten Island. Junk rules many of the film's compositions, and, thematically, the film revolves around the detritus of an urban consumer society in which transnational corporations bring raw materials from the Third World, contaminating goods and people in the process, and dump them in the borough. Fresh Kill makes sense out of this refuse by exploring connections among people on the edges of corporate capitalism and off-center in a white, bourgeois, heterosexual world. From the beaches of Taiwan's Orchid Island, used as a nuclear waste site in the 1980s, to the shores of New York's Staten Island, Fresh Kill collapses the globe in solidarity against racism, sexism, and the excesses of transnational corporate capitalism as resistance circulates through networks originally designed to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital.