Stay frosty
By Joseph Lavers
Good morning 🐣
Hello, fellow Cinescapees! I took a little time off and I can’t wait to dive back into things. How are you? Seen anything good lately? Wait… what’s that you’ve got there?
Oh just an Afrofuturistic, spiritual, rebellious, and funky musical set in a computer hacker village (that may or may not be located on an alternate plane of existence) that confronts the gender binary, oppression, and economic exploitation with lyrics and dialogue in Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French, and English, you say?
OK I see you. Let’s go!
“Neptune Frost” has one of the dreamier plots and dialogue I’ve seen in a while and plays more as a poem than a straight narrative film. Matalusa (Bertrand “Kaya Free” Ninteretse) is one of many faceless workers in an open-pit mine in Burundi. They’re digging for cobalt, a mineral used in all our electronics, and are soon reminded that their lives have far less value than your and my cell phones ever did when Matalusa’s brother is casually murdered by the overseers. Meanwhile Neptune (an intersex character played by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja) escapes a sexual assault and flees into the countryside. They eventually connect with a group of outcasts in an abandoned village built out of discarded computer parts, fomenting a techno-revolution and dancing the night away.
The poet/musician Saul Williams originally planned to make “Neptune Frost” as a graphic novel and stage musical, but ended up collaborating with the Rwandan actress/playwright Anisia Uzeyman to turn it into a feature film, with a little producing help from Kickstarter, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ezra Miller, and Stephen Hendel (who previously created a Tony Award-winning Broadway show about the musician Fela Kuti). Williams wrote the screenplay and music, while Uzeyman handled cinematography, but shout out to costume designer Cedric Mizero and the hair and makeup creative director, Tanya Melendez, who together created an amazing future-adjacent world of motherboard headdresses and neon warpaint.
It’s also hard to even describe this as a musical. There are songs. The characters sing them. But it’s not really like anything you’ve seen before. It’s funky, poetic, disorienting, full of color, and literally raises a middle finger straight at the camera.