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Logline
Dystopian cyberpunk erotic film about mutant HI viruses and the addictive rush of fluids.
Shu Lea Cheang’s queer cypherpunk science-fiction film is set in 2060, after the government has announced the eradication of AIDS. Mutated HIV have, however, led to the creation of a new species, the ZERO GEN: genetically evolved gender-fluid humans whose ejaculation is the hypernarcotic of the 21st century. This drug spreads through contact with skin and produces an addictive high. A new war on drugs begins, and the ZERO GEN are declared illegal. They are caught between underground drug lords, glitched super-agents, a scheming corporation, and a corrupt government.
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Before the film: Talk with Shu Lea Cheang
City 3
Meet the director
Shu Lea Cheang
Shu Lea Cheang is a leading multimedia artist. With her approach at the intersection of film, video, Internet-based installation, software interaction, and durational performance, she is considered a pioneer in Internet-based art. Born in Taiwan in 1954, Cheang earned her bachelor’s degree in history in Taipei in the mid-1970s and subsequently moved to New York City to study Cinema Studiesfilm. Shortly thereafter, she joined Paper Tiger TV, a collective that broadcast live weekly programs on public-access television. Grassroots in nature, the collective sought to revolutionize television by playfully challenging its underlying ideologies in a do-it-yourself approach. Her operating radius has simply adapted to the technological developments and media available at a given time, such as by expanding into the networks of cyberspace in the late 1990s. Her works have been shown at international festivals such as Sundance and the Berlinale, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the ICC in Tokyo, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and presented at biennials and art shows such as the Documenta in Kassel and the Gwangju Biennale.