Shareen Lightfoot and Claire Mayakovsky raise their daughter Honey near the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City. Shareen works as a salvager recovering refuse from the landfill, while Claire works as a waitress at a sushi restaurant. The city is heavily contaminated with pollution that adversely affects local animals and food; Claire brings home contaminated fish from the restaurant that is eaten by Honey, who begins glowing green and then vanishes. Shareen and Claire discover that the multinational GX Corporation is responsible for the pollution and Honey's disappearance, and become involved in an effort to hack and expose the company with sushi chef and hacker Jiannbin Lui, and poet and dishwasher Miguel Flores.
Fresh Kill was directed by Shu Lea Cheang and written by Jessica Hagedorn. The film bills itself as "eco cyber noia", the term "cyber noia" having been coined by Cheang to describe "massive intrusions of networking technology into people's lives," and what she foresaw as "a future where multinational media empires clash with hackers." Cheang has stated that the film was motivated by a desire to depict the relationship between the media and environmental racism, drawing parallels between the dumping of industrial toxic waste in the Third World with "the dumping of garbage TV programs" into Third World countries. Hagedorn has stated that she wished to invert typical expectations and clichés stock characters, though sought not to "reverse things for their own sake," noting that Honey's parentage and the differing races of characters with direct biological relations are specifically never explained.
In a review for The Los Angeles Times, critic Kevin Thomas offered praise for Cheang's direction and Hagedorn's writing, noting that the film's "interaction of a deteriorating environment, burgeoning cyberspace and mounting urban paranoia create a vividly contemporary background" for a "gentle lesbian love story." The Quad Cinema, where the film had its U.S. premiere, called Fresh Kill "an underseen radical feminist gem" and favorably compared it to Brazil and Born in Flames. Conversely, Janet Maslin of The New York Times offered praise for the film's soundtrack but described Fresh Kill as "aimless, arty self-indulgence carried to a remarkable extreme," while Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club surmised that the film was "too confused and disjointed to be anything but a well-intentioned, intermittently interesting failure." The film is noted for its themes of solidarity by marginalized groups against racism and sexism; its condemnation of transnational capitalism; and its depiction of how "resistance circulates through networks originally designed to facilitate the exchange of labor, commodities, and capital." In her analysis of Fresh Kill, Gina Marchetti notes how the film depicts "the emancipatory potential of the digital," offering "hope for seizing the means of communication by reflecting on its own production and providing an image ofradical media empowerment to inspire others." The film is noted for its influence on hacker subculture, with a 1995 article about the film for the now-defunct hacker publication InfoNation containing one of the first uses of the term "hacktivism".
