'Fresh Kill' imagined a contaminated city. 30 years later it feels spot-on

Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang, 70, had been on the road for about two weeks of a month-long road trip across the United States when she met a reporter in Ann Arbor before a screening of her 1994 experimental film Fresh Kill.

“When the film first came out, many people didn’t quite get it,” Cheang said. She wore bright orange trousers and her white hair was cropped close to her scalp.

Fresh Kill is neither a horror movie nor a documentary. It’s an experimental film, taking its name from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island that, at its peak, took in about 29,000 tons of garbage every day. The ginormous landfill is now a park.

The film has aged well. Its surreal, sci-fi inflected story of pollution and environmental inequality feels prescient, and the film’s vision of a contaminated city is scathing, funny and surreal. Characters include concerned lesbian moms, eco-terrorists and wealthy business bros who snack on sushi that turns their skin glowing green.

From New York to Paris

Shu Lea Cheang is a leading new media and multimedia artist, who’s exhibited at museums all over the country, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She was the first to create a web-based artwork for the Guggenheim Museum and won this year’s LG Guggenheim Award.

Cheang joined New York’s vibrant downtown theater scene in the 1980s after moving there from Taiwan. Fresh Kill is filled with many of its faces, including George C. Wolfe (former artistic director of the Public Theater), and National Book Award finalist Jessica Hagedorn, who also wrote Fresh Kill’s screenplay. The soundtrack is by Vernon Reid, who founded the band Living Colour. New York rents have priced out Cheang, who now lives in Paris though she has been for decades an American citizen.

A film restored

New York University, which holds Cheang’s archives, recently restored the original 35mm film.

That's when Cheang decided to take her film on a road trip, to be screened across the country. “I wrote to every cinema that had 35mm projection capacity,” she said. “So romantic, right?”

Jazz Jones, who is one of two young filmmakers traveling with Cheang, met her last year at a Florida film festival where he first saw her one of her movies.

“I was just like, this is freaking insane. I have to talk to this woman,” he recalled. “And she starts talking about this trip and I’m like, 'Can I be your driver?'”

Jean-Paul Jones, who is also accompanying Cheang, is a projectionist in addition to being a filmmaker, a useful skill on a trip when the film print is handed off and inspected at 21 theaters in 33 days. The theaters that have the capacity to screen the film tend to be among the most beautiful and eclectic in the country, including Chicago's Music Box Theatre, the Harris Theater in Pittsburgh and Cine Athens in Georgia.

As they travel, Jones and Franklin are filming their own documentary about the experience, which so far has included stops in Flint, Mich., to discuss the water crisis with people who live there, and a detour for lunch at a Haitian restaurant in Springfield, Ohio.