Screened as part of NZIFF 2018

Liquid Sky 1982

Directed by Slava Tsukerman

Stunningly restored after years of neglect, the quintessential cult item of 1982 drills into a gender fluid New York New Wave club scene of fashionista warfare, hard drugs and extra-terrestrial visitation.

USA In English
113 minutes 4K DCP

Director/Producer

Screenplay

Slava Tsukerman
,
Anne Carlisle
,
Nina V. Kerova

Photography

Yuri Neyman

Editors

Sharyn Leslie Ross
,
Slava Tsukerman

Production/Costume designer

Marina Levikova

Music

Slava Tsukerman
,
Brenda I. Hutchinson
,
Clive Smith

With

Anne Carlisle (Margaret/Jimmy)
,
Paula E. Sheppard (Adrian)
,
Susan Doukas (Sylvia)
,
Otto Von Wernherr (Johann)
,
Bob Brady (Owen)
,
Elaine C. Grove (Katherine)
,
Stanley Knap (Paul)
,
Jack Adalist (Vincent)
,
Lloyd Ziff (Lester)
,
Harry Lum (deliveryman)
,
Roy MacArthur (Jack)

Festivals

Wellington 1983; Auckland 1984

Bodiless extra-terrestrials descend on Manhattan’s post-punk club scene for the heroin and stay for the sex, vaporising their fodder in explosions of psychedelic ecstasy at the moment of climax. Margaret, a pansexual New Wave fashion star, discovers she can dispatch unwelcome suitors by feeding the aliens’ habit. Anne Carlisle, who co-wrote the film with recent Russian émigrés Slava Tsukerman and Nina V. Kerova, brings eerie concentration to playing both the dangerously bored Margaret and cokehead male model Jimmy, her caustic fashionista rival.

Their awesomely jaded carnival of sexual identity (and hairdressing) as art form and weapon is as startling now as when it twice filled the St James for Festival midnight screenings in 1984. A quintessential artefact of 1980s New Wave, Liquid Sky looks and sounds sharper than ever in this 2018 4K restoration.

“At last… Slava Tsukerman’s 1982 neon-fired New Wave New York alien sex-party punk-disco orgasm-as-revenge proto-electroclash feminist genderfuck is on screens in its finest form, scrubbed and crisp and gorgeous, ready to baffle, disquiet, thrill, and trigger… The tangerine skylines, sweat-slick club dancers, grubby-chic apartments, ubiquitous neon, lavishly asymmetrical hairdos and so-primitive-they-fascinate alien effects demand truly to be seen

Liquid Sky has always been caught smack between delirious curio, avant-garde put-on, exploitation cheapie, and naive masterpiece. Today, it seems prescient… A singular vision of a twilight Manhattan haunted by the lost, the daring, the damned, the jonesing – and some aliens.” — Alan Scherstuhl, Village Voice