I.K.U.

Imagine a post-‘Blade Runner’,  post-apocalyptic metropolis, populated with irresistible kinky cyborgs, known as I.K.U. Coders. Equipped with an insatiable sexual appetite and unicorn-like arms which turn into dildos, they sex you up in order to extract your orgasm data for their hard drives.
Imagine further the attractive data collectors, the I.K.U. Runner Units, who eventually catch up with I.K.U. Coders to “fuck to retrieve” their “full data” hard drive so that a company calling itself the Genom Corporation can mass produce the erotic experiences as memory chips. And imagine, finally, that you can buy these chips from vending machines on any street corner, insert them in your mobile phone and call up colour coded I.K.U. data to suit your tastes…
Welcome to the cyber-erotic world of Shu Lea Cheang’s I.K.U., an experimental Japanese porno film, celebrating the wired body and trans-gendered sexual interactivity of the not-so-distant future. I.K.U. – Japanese for “I’m coming” – starts off with a drum’n’bass soundtrack and computer animated graphics.
Mixing the conventions of sci-fi, hardcore erotica, Japanese advertising and manga, the film unfolds at the speed of cyberspace through the non-linear logic of a hypertext novel. The result is a polymorphous ride through the tech-driven libidos of its players: Reiko, the female cyborg, Dizzy, the transsexual I.K.U. runner and Tokyo-Rose, a manipulative dominatrix working for a rival corporation.
Cheang refashions pornography’s boundaries and its aesthetics in order to make a sex flick for the wired generation. “I did not make this film for masturbation. I made it for collective orgasm,” Cheang maintains, citing the way cyberspace fosters communal experiences that are moving sexuality beyond the private and the personal. “It is like doing drag, like transsexuality, the way we are interfacing with technology and extending our identity into it.”
The Face comments: “...it is this intersection of sex and technology that lends I.K.U. its groundbreaking predigree - and not just as pornography. I.K.U. is one long lavish visual metaphor for the sexual freedoms afforded by the internet, fantasies you can indulge with others regardless of gender, social constraints or even physical possibilities.”

The film will be introduced by the director.

written and directed by: Shu Lea Cheang; cinematographer: Tetsuya Kamoto; editor: Kazuhiro Shirao; music: Hoppy Kamiyama; with : Ayumu Tokitou, Zachery Nataf …

in cooperation with: Slovenska kinoteka in Retrovizor