Neptune Frost
Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, Rwanda,  2021
Wolfensohn Hall
Thursday, February 23, 4:30 p.m. 

The story of Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturists utopian musical, was developed by musician Saul Williams who co-directed this film with Anisia Uzeyman.   

Excerpt from a review by A.O. Scott (New York Times, June 2, 2022) 
... "The movie, an Afrofuturist fantasia that is also a musical, a science-fiction parable and a hacker manifesto, depicts a pocket of resistance in the form of a community of African rebels. Surrounded by political violence, economic injustice and cultural alienation, they try to secure a space where imagination and solidarity can flourish. The challenges are formidable, but their commitment is part of what makes “Neptune Frost” moving as well as mind-bending.  It is also a pocket of resistance in its own right, insofar as the act of making the film — and for that matter thinking about it — amounts to a critique of the way things are. The main characters are Matalusa (Kaya Free), who works alongside his brother in an open-pit mine in Burundi, digging up coltan, a mineral that helps power the world’s cellphones. After his brother is killed, Matalusa flees. At the same time, Neptune (Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo), described by the filmmakers as “an intersex runaway,” escapes from an attempted sexual assault. Their journeys finally converge in the hacker encampment. (“Frost” is the name of a magical, brightly colored messenger bird.) ... This isn’t a tight, tidy allegory of capitalism and colonialism so much as a collage of vivid images, sounds and words that punch the movie’s themes like hashtags. Williams and Uzeyman marry anarchist politics with anarchist aesthetics, making something that feels both handmade and high-tech, digital and analog, poetic and punk rock.”