When American musician Saul Williams and actor-writer Anisia Uzeyman came up with the concept for their directorial debut, Neptune Frost, they considered using several mediums, including a studio album, a graphic novel, and a stage musical. It’s wrong to say they settled on a film, because Neptune Frost feels like an amalgamation of all of the above. A powerful treatise on the destruction of constructed binaries, the pair are iconoclastic in their approach: they take what exists and reshuffle it into something original and fluid.
Set in Burundi but shot in Rwanda, the young Neptune starts out played by Elvis Ngabo, before blossoming into Cheryl Isheja after being taken to a place known as the ‘Motherboard’ by a priestess. Their journey through gender presentation bleeds into the broader clash between a collective of hackers called Digitoria and ‘The Authority’ who exploit the work and bodies of the villagers. Politics and identity collide with romance as Neptune forms a relationship with the collective’s leader, Matalusa, played by Burundian rapper Bertrand ‘Kaya Free’ Ninteretse.
The Afrofuturist aesthetic is sensational to watch.
The songs in Neptune Frost look beyond our world to an imagined one, to outer space where Earthly binaries do not exist. Some of the music feels reminiscent of the radically transgressive cult queer musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch (2001), similarly smashing gendered images together to create something new and beautiful. The Afrofuturist aesthetic is sensational to watch, peppering the darkness with fluorescent paints and found objects to create something alien but still identifiable as human. Yet each time we come back to reality, something has shifted in our perception.
Neptune Frost uses the musical to elevate a tradition of African surrealism, from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) to Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019), into a unique work. It’s not a difference to be afraid of, though — embrace it, and who knows what we might discover about ourselves and each other.