Fresh Kill

Kill is Dutch for “stream,” and Shu Lea Cheang’s audacious directorial debut is a lethal comedy swimming through a torrent of toxic multinational treachery. Fresh Kill tells the story of two young lesbian parents (Sarita Choudhury and Erin McMurtry) caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. The place is New York and the time is now. 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 tongues. The crisis escalates when a multinational corporation is implicated and the couple’s infant daughter mysteriously vanishes. After uncovering censored information, a group of young New Yorkers makes an unlikely alliance with activists in the developing world and strikes back. A riveting and densely packed film, Fresh Kill evokes the furious rhythms of channel surfing with its rapid-fire editing style. Cheang and screenwriter Jessica Hagedorn have conjured a trippy, extraliterary dimension, one where Jorge Luis Borges’s search for his “Dreamtiger” intersects with lesbian-erotic flights into cyberspace. A striking score by Vernon Reid and wicked cameos by performance art stalwarts Ron Vawter, Karen Finley, Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley feed the frenzy. –SFIFF