Neptune Frost

In the near future, a group of escaped miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective in the hilltops of Burundi in an attempt to create a movement bent on overthrowing the authoritarian regime currently exploiting not just the region's natural resources, but its people as well.

A colorful, dense, and bizarre Afrofuturist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonialist film, with a junkyard cyberpunk aesthetic, filmed in the e-waste sites in Burundi, Neptune Frost is movie by co-directors American artist Saul Williams, and Anissa Uzeyman, a Rwandan filmmaker. It is a strange sci-fi parable, as well as a captivating anarchist manifesto. It’s a movie about finding your truth, and speaking that truth to power. It’s a film about community and resistance, and an allegory about the debt of stolen lives and resources that are owed to developing nations by the wealthy and technologically-advanced societies of the world.

Also, it’s a musical.

In the aftermath of an unspecified war, and now stuck living in the resulting fascist oppression, Matalusa is a former rare earth metal miner, and current technological prophet, who has broken his shackles and run away from his oppressed life after his brother was killed by company guards, while he was working in the company mines, mining minerals that power the world’s cellphones. Neptune (a dual role played by Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo), is a newly awoken Neo/Christ-like figure, described by the filmmakers as “an intersex runaway,” on the run after surviving an attempted sexual assault. Their path eventually leads to an encampment—a place that kind of looks like the set of the Max Headroom show, but if it were in a sparsely wooded field—that is filled with like-minded souls all looking to build a new world free of the oppression and authority ruling their current one.

Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the world does not approve of this vision.

Neptune Frost is difficult movie to summarize. It has a story, and it definitely has things that it wants to talk about, and it does talk about these things, but there’s more than that going on here that’s worth commenting on. Visually arresting, even without taking into consideration the film’s obvious shoestring budget, the film plays with big concepts and heavy metaphors, set to a thundering heartbeat of a soundtrack, and all with just some splashes of glow-in-the-dark paint thrown around, a few interestingly repurposed pieces of garbage, and a cast that is more than willing to throw themselves fully into the work.

All told, it’s a stunning piece of work, simply for existing.

And it works, mostly. It’s definitely interesting and cool looking, but admittedly, your own personal mileage may vary, because while, yeah, Neptune Frost is basically a big super hippy film, like a cyberpunk Electric Company meets Hair, but set in Africa, which can be a difficult thing to vibe with, but to me, the film’s context and execution make it interesting, and definitely something worth checking out.