This debut feature by Sara Driver, producer of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, focuses on the hybridized cityscape of lower Manhattan. The urban mix of the burgeoning Soho art world (represented by a cast including performance artist Magnuson and playwright Harvey Perr) and a traditional Chinatown finds its embodiment in the figure of Nicole (Fletcher), a blonde computer typesetter at a high-tech downtown printing company and freelance Chinese translator with an Asian son. In a modernist neo-noir plot twist, Nicole becomes implicated in the handling of a stolen manuscript of an ancient Chinese tale, unsettling and fantastic details of which begin to seep into the present day story. The resulting work was, according to critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “the most visually ravishing American independent film of its year.”