IKU

Directed by Shu Lea Cheang | 91 minutes | 18+ | Australian Premiere |

8:30pm Saturday, 31 May | Estonian House | Buy Tickets | Buy Passes

Widely celebrated for her genre-bending contributions to queer cinema and media art, net art nomad and cyberfeminist Shu Lea Cheang’s multidisciplinary work deals with issues of institutional oppression, sexual politics, and global capitalism expressed through psychedelic cyberpunk scenarios, multimedia collages, and erotic CGI-aided spectacle. In other words: very cool stuff. BUFF is proud to present a double feature of Cheang’s 2000 feature I.K.U. (Director’s Cut!!) and its decades-later brain-expanding sequel UKI (2023) for the first time ever in Australia.

I.K.U. (Director’s Cut)

BODIES ARE PACKAGES MADE TO BE OPENED, MINDS ARE PENETRABLE, SENSATIONS COMMUNICABLE, ORGASMS COLLECTIBLE 

First premiering at Sundance Film Festival in 2000 to hostile reviews, Cheang’s queer sci-fi hardcore porn film I.K.U. invents a future cybersexual universe where pleasure robots roam the empty spaces of unseen metropolises, hunting willing prey for orgasmic sexual marathons conducted in the service of science. One such irresistible replicant is Reiko, who is equipped with unicorn-like arms which turns into a dildo machine designed to collect and transmit the specifications of orgasms into centralised, corporatised databases. Explicitly referencing Blade Runner but forging its own hyper-stylised dystopian aesthetic, I.K.U. is part overwhelming aesthetic experience, part hardcore political provocation.

SIMILAR: The Matrix Reloaded, the writing of Samuel R Delany, the films of Gregg Araki, Sixteen Tongues, Love & Pop

WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS EXPLICIT, UNSIMULATED DEPICTIONS OF SEX + STROBE LIGHTING

"Every technological invention of the twentieth century has been designed in the service of either pornography or the military. Those early demonstrations of camcorders and interactive video games always featured some version of cyber blow-up dolls gauged to fulfill every fantasy of the male users. Well, I.K.U. democratizes all that. I.K.U. frees the body from gender restrictions, empowers the object of fantasy, and merges the user and the used, the carrier and the carried, into a cyber-satyricon of impulses, stimulants, and gratifications." - B. Ruby Rich

"The frantic digital zooms in this movie excite me!" - Kai Perrignon, BUFF Head Programmer

Co-Presented with Gay24

Country: United States
Year: 2000
Language: Japanese