Sundance Film Festival 2022 Premiere – If you are curious about what afrofuturism is, Neptune Frost is it! Every single member of the crew deserves to be highlighted for their contribution to this unique film, from the costume design to the story writing to the cinematography, as Neptune Frost invents new approaches to depict its story, creating what felt like a mix of performance art and slam poetry that was interesting to watch — and that is an understatement.

Though directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman originally meant for Neptune Frost to be a stage musical, the film is being executive produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda and screened as a Spotlight feature during the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The film brings attention to the fact that the minerals for the technology and power systems that the world enjoys are based on the exploitation of black bodies, in the case of this film, those of miners in Rwanda.

In the film, a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse “Kaya Free”) sees his brother killed by their violent overseer, and after a series of yet more unfortunate events, he is forced to run away from the oppressive Burundi regime. After he is nearly killed himself in a car accident, he finds that he has been saved by a group of mysterious women that lead him to a village made of recycled computer parts and more escapees like him. There, he meets an intersex runaway named Neptune (played by both Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo “Bobo”), who has struggled with being outcast from society for not fitting gender norms.

After they come together, they begin a revolution against “a world beholden to the currency of their depletion” — the people who use their bodies and labor to form communication devices for only each other but refuse to communicate with the very people they are exploiting. As noted in the film, it is the plight of brown bodies “to be more effective at building power systems than they are destroying them,” but the escapees of the Matalusa Kingdom find that through the music they can make a defiant stand against the people trying to destroy them.

I tend to think of afrofuturism as any work of art that portrays the experience of those from the African diaspora with themes of science fiction and progressive-thinking philosophies — I used to just suggest the 1978 cult classic The Wiz as an example, one of the most wonderfully weird movies ever made — but I can now also suggest Neptune Frost. Both of these movies are science fiction musicals that have their main characters go on a journey into an alternate dimension at some point, but Neptune Frost places itself in the dystopian future and more overtly brings to light the corruption that surrounds its characters.

Like many afrofuturistic stories, Nepture Frost places its story in the future in order to be free of the constraints of the reality that would limit the possibilities of what the characters could do, but at the same time that it looks to the future, the story-writers also reach back through costume and music, a balance that is highlighted in the film’s beautiful and powerful ending scene with a simultaneous drum line to connect with traditional drumming of the ancients.

The miner is the source of energy that powers industrialization as slaves in the American slave trade were used to build up a nation, and in the same way that slaves sang spirituals while working, so did the miners in Neptune Frost. Director Saul Williams likens the lyrics in the film’s songs to being a manifesto in poetry form, made all the more expressive being set to the hip hop and techno score. As humans, sometimes issues are better expressed and understood through music rather than a lecture, and Neptune Frost does just that — the music sometimes had discordant notes to aurally depict the dissonance of being outcast and subjugated.

Each song is definitely a bop, going hard with the beats and hitting hard with the lyrical content that addresses the sociopolitical issues the characters were facing. In addition to its haunting musical score, Neptune Frost also had beautiful colors — it is not a psychedelic film, but somehow it felt just as colorful as one. The fields and landscape of Rwanda were picturesque in each shot, but the film never let me forget that just beyond those natural wonders lies death and exploitation.

Neptune Frost is a drama, mixed with exposé documentary, mixed with urban opera that addresses heavy contemporary themes of gender discrimination and modern-day slavery systems. Neptune Frost is like a spiritual journey, one that leads into a future where the exploited can transcend their current stations in life and walk into a different dimension, a dimension that allows for their humanity and their talent to manifest unhindered. The film moved me emotionally, but its rhythmic musical score made me want to move my body as well, sway in a tantric understanding of both its words and its cadences. I need the Neptune Frost soundtrack — right now!

8 Out of 10