Women's Lifestyle June 22, 2026 0 Comments

How Shu Lea Cheang’s Queer Eco-Feminist Cyberpunk Film Is Rewiring the Future of Culture and Creativity—And Why You Can’t Miss It

Ever wonder what it’d be like if it literally rained soap… but not the bubble bath kind—more like polluted, toxic soap falling from the skies of a dystopian New York? Yeah, sounds bizarre, but that’s exactly the eerie reality Shu Lea Cheang paints in her 1994 film, Fresh Kill. Picture this: a worn-out, graffiti-covered truck, a man hopping on its hood—not to be some road-rager, but to clean the grimy window—and suddenly, flakes of “soap” drift down from the air, reminders of an industrial wasteland right outside their doorstep. It’s a moment so surreal yet chillingly real, it sticks with you long after the credits roll. But don’t get it twisted—this isn’t just a post-apocalyptic flick; it’s an 80-minute dive into corporate environmental brutality, mass paranoia, and the raw fight of a family forced to become hacktivists to expose sinister corporate evils lurking in the shadows. If you think the world of today feels tangled with digital chaos, environmental crises, and shady corporate control—welcome to Fresh Kill’s uncanny vision from three decades ago. Now, let’s unravel how this cult classic not only foresaw the mess we’re in today but also how it’s shaking up conversations about sex, activism, and the digital age in ways many never expected. LEARN MORE

5 min read

about 20 minutes into Shu Lea Cheang’s 1994 film Fresh Kill, Shareen Lightfoot (Sarita Choudhury) and her daughter Honey (Nelini Stamp) nearly drive into a man with their run-down, spray-painted truck. At first, the man jumps onto the hood of the car to clean the truck’s window before small white flecks begin to fall onto the trio. Honey thinks it’s sugar, but the man clarifies that it’s “raining soap”: pollutant overflow from the Staten Island industrial zone where they live. “Living in New York, you always encounter these really unexpected [moments],” she explains on a recent phone call. “The guy jumping on the truck and then telling you that [the stuff falling from the sky] is actually polluted soap.”

Fresh Kill, Cheang’s first feature-length film, is an 80-minute feverish interrogation of corporate environmental violence and modern-age paranoia. Shareen lives with her partner Claire Mayakosky (Erin McMurtry), on a dystopian Staten Island; a lesbian couple raising their daughter in a garage-turned-apartment near the Fresh Kills landfill. Shareen spends her days salvaging from the dump, while Claire works as a waitress at an upscale sushi restaurant, where the red lips of the “Yamakazu” fish, imported from Taiwan, become a radioactive delicacy for the city’s elites, turning people green and eventually making them vanish. Pollution is rampant, part of everyday life—the entire sky is covered by a sickly red smog. But when Honey develops the same radioactive symptoms and vanishes, her two mothers respond as any caring parents should: by becoming hacker-activists, compelled to expose the environmental evils of the GX Corporation. Meanwhile, GX buys ACC, one of the biggest media channels, in order to control the flow of information.

Seagulls flying over a landfill at sunset with machinery in the background.

Criterion

Erin McMurtry and Sarita Choudhury in Fresh Kill.

Despite its frenetic structure, the story is rooted in what Cheang calls the “harsh” reality of New York during the late ’80s and ’90, when AIDS was at its height. “You look at this reality in terms of environmental racism, socially, politically, and economically in general, it’s quite harsh,” the director says. “I want to transmit this message. So how do I do it? Do I go do a documentary? Do I go really straight on and carry out the message, or use a meta-narrative? Science fiction allows me to [tell this story].”

The harsh reality also extended to Cheang’s home country, Taiwan, specifically Orchid Island, where the government was dumping nuclear waste at the time (now it’s a site for tourists). Several times during Fresh Kill, Cheang splices footage of the island into the story, hammering in the global implications of this type of corporate malfeasance. (Incredible foresight for the filmmaker, though commonplace today.) One symbol she returns to is a “ghost ship” carrying nuclear waste that is circling the planet, trying unsuccessfully to find a port, underscoring how polluted waters are anything but an isolated issue. “If you consider that environmental racism is still there, it didn’t go away—the nuclear waste being buried at Orchid Island is still there,” Cheang says. “It’s sinking into the water, but it actually did bring up a whole generation of environmental activists.”

Fresh Kill borrows the frenetic editing style from Cheang’s days with Paper Tiger Television, a public access TV show in New York during the ’80s; with much of the film being experienced as if flipping through channels. As such, understanding the narrative requires close attention; otherwise, Fresh Kill functions best as a piece of experiential video art. Anyone watching for the first time will inevitably be struck by the film’s prescience, whether it’s the protagonists hacking into the corporate broadcast or simply the free flow of information it conveys—Cheang’s multi-layered thesis punctures through each of the quick cuts. At the end of the movie, the family rides the Staten Island ferry, but the director quickly switches the images to Orchid Island. “For me, it’s really a way [to talk] about the virtual world we’re living in now,” she says. “We feel like we can travel through time and space more freely.”

Three people bundled up, looking into the distance under a cloudy sky.

Criterion

Claire holding Honey (Nelini Stamp) with Rino Thunder as Clayton Lightfoot, Sr.

Sex, as well, plays an important role in subversion for Cheang. The filmmaker explains that back then, she felt a gap between how people spoke about sex and activism, when, to her, they were intertwined. “I do feel the need to convey that we can talk about sex,” she says. “Being an artist, being an activist—we never really talked about sex. I feel I have these two threads of life—later on, I will go on to make some porno films, only because I do feel like there’s a gap that seems like the private life or the sex life is so separated from your appearance in the outside world.” Here, Cheang lays the foundation for a career characterized by her ability to oscillate between eroticism, digital nature, and eco-consciousness. Fresh Kill, in many ways, catalyzed her future exploration, including her beloved Sci-Fi porno, I.K.U. (2000), telling the story of cybernetic robots collecting “orgasm data” for corporations. Her most recent project, LOVER LOVE (2026) at New York’s Leslie Lohman Museum, champions trans and gender-nonconforming life in today’s world, oscillating between virtual and physical spaces. The origins of this are packaged in her first hallucinogenic cyberpunk chronicle.

The film also pioneered ideas of “hacktivism” and digital culture, telling a now-familiar story of corporate media manipulation. Three decades ago, Cheang billed this science fiction film as “eco-cybernoia,” a subgenre that clairvoyantly predicted the intertwined nature of technology, environmental disaster, and mass hysteria today. “Eco-cybernoia, of course, is about paranoia,” she says. “I think today, we’re probably even more paranoid—if you could ever navigate through the whole mess of the media.”

The film was originally released to little fanfare but has since gone on to become a cult classic. Perhaps because environmental disaster is more ever-present, because we truly live digitally, or our awareness of corporate evil (though it’s probably all of the above). At a screening two years ago, Cheang witnessed a new wave of appreciation. “I was sitting there with this audience, a new generation of audience, and they were just laughing,” she says. “Finally, 30 years later, I really feel the people [have caught] up with the film.”