Tycoon
a feature film by
Charlotte Zhang
Sunday, June 7 | 6:30 PM
On the brink of the 2028 Olympics, two young men drift through Los Angeles, committing petty crimes, driving around, hanging out. A livestock virus wipes out the meat supply. Cockroaches overrun the city. The logic of supply and demand gives way to a new protein source. A biblical sense of doom wafts through the air, and the shadow of 1992 is never far from the frame. Punctuated with montages of xeroxed images and shot on mini-DV, Super 8, and iPhone, Tycoon is a hybrid punk-noir debut from Charlotte Zhang, lit with civil disobedience and flashes of collective catharsis. Paradise is a joyride. Tycoon will be preceded by another Los Angeles-set short video work, engulfed in grief and flame, Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth, by Laura Ohio.
This program is rated 14A
Tycoon, dir. Charlotte Zhang
2026 | Canada / USA | 89 | video | Manitoban premiere
Los Angeles on the cusp of the 2028 Summer Olympics: a series of devastating livestock viruses have wiped out meat and poultry production across the nation, leaving genetically-modified cockroaches the most viable alternative. Meanwhile, a cockroach infestation of biblical proportions overwhelms the city, triggering a rash of eminent domain abuses. Two young grifters dream up their next big score in a paranoid landscape perpetually reshaped by the collapse between legitimized and illegitimate forms of celebration and theft.
Charlotte Zhang is an artist and filmmaker whose work examines reenactment, shared fantasy and social scripts produced through spectacle. Her practice engages with questions of libidinal investment, erotic economies and the ways punishment and celebration intersect within structures of state-sanctioned violence. Working primarily with moving image, Zhang explores cycles of desire, control and vengeance as recurring narrative and visual forms. Her videos, collages, and sculptural work have since been shown internationally, including festival screenings in New York, Chicago, and Berlin. In 2021, she received the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize.
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Like a Tongue Knows the Mouth , dir. Laura Ohio
2024 | Canada/USA | 24 | video
Time becomes a spiral when a freeway fire causes a city-wide traffic jam and leads the filmmaker to follow an elderly woman walking through Downtown Los Angeles. Ohio delves into the well of grief and brings back the solitude of being human, the presence of absence, and the inescapable nature of the first home.