Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
Bertrand Nintereste, Elvis Ngabo, Cheryl Isheja, Trésor Niyongabo, Dorcy Rugumba, Elaine Umuhire, Rebecca Mucyo
Intro:
… a miracle in independent filmmaking.
Neptune Frost, by US musician Saul Williams and his Rwandan born partner, Anisia Uzeyman, is a film that acts as a disruption to the colonial machine. The genre bending piece of cinema took out the $140K Bright Horizons Award at the Melbourne International Film Festival against a strong field of competitors. To say that there is little out there like Neptune Frost is an understatement; the sci-fiction Afrofuturist musical that dissects everything from unchecked authority, to resource theft, human slavery, patriarchy, religion, and gender construction, is a miracle in independent filmmaking.
Set in an alternate Burundi (a close neighbour to Rwanda where the film was shot), the narrative follows a miner, Matalusa (Burundian rapper Kaya Free, here credited as Bertrand Nintereste), gender-fluid Neptune (played at first by Elvis Ngabo, and then post-transition by Cheryl Isheja), and University student, Psychology (Trésor Niyongabo), as they each flee dangers to eventually be guided to the Digitaria Collective by waking dreams.
Matalusa was a miner who dug for Coltan (a mineral that powers cell phones and computers). His brother, Tekno, is murdered in the mine by a soldier because he stopped working for a moment to hold up the ore. Grief and rage surge through Matalusa, who ended up in the mine after a protracted civil war as an unpaid labourer.
After Neptune buries their mother, a pastor comes knocking, citing bible passages but hoping to sexually abuse Neptune. They defend themselves and are forced to leave the village in the dead of night.
Elsewhere, Psychology is protesting in student riots at the University. The police, working for The Authority, have shut down all forms of communication with the outside world. After the protests, they come looking for students who hid in the library “Under the letter O for oppression, under the letter P for patriarchy.”). Songs of revolution are sung into small devices which resemble a phone and a camera.
Each protagonist takes the journey to Digitaria, but it is Neptune’s that is most profound. Somewhere along the road, they are injured, which leads them to be remade as The Motherboard and shed their “boy” identity that was forced upon them. Neptune, as played by Cheryl Isheja, is illuminated by the transition and has a change in consciousness that connects her to the unseen workings of the digital world. She creates a static that affects electrical devices. Born anew at the age of twenty-three, Neptune must navigate both her past and her present to reach the future. Along the way, she encounters Innocent (Dorcy Rugumba), a mysterious man who is attracted to her but spurns her violently when he discovers that she is trans.
Arriving at Digitaria at separate times, Psychology, Matalusa, and Neptune each discover the secret of the possibly extra-dimensional collective. Williams is a little fuzzy with his script as to what Digitaria is, but not what it represents. The collective, held together by Memory (Elaine Umuhire) and Elohel (Rebecca Mucyo), is a space of love and freedom that seeks to overturn the Authority with the very technology that it has been trading to colonial powers at the cost of Black bodies.
Neptune and Matalusa form a connection which powers Digitaria and does something more – it hacks world systems. Neptune is the Motherboard, who can see through binary code to the spaces where it can be exploited. Digitaria becomes Martyr Loser Kingdom (named ostensibly after Matalusa, but also a reference to Martin Luther King). The inhabitants of Martyr Loser Kingdom celebrate as their invisible voices begin to be heard across the world. Finally, the people who are literally behind the screens we live our digital lives on, are in front of the screen and their musical cry for revolution is heard.
Neptune Frost is an intensely philosophical film, with characters ruminating on the cost that living in a third world country that is beholden to first world powers takes on them. “To imagine hell is a privilege,” one character says. They are scarred by civil war and the corrupt regime that rules them, but they are also scarred by anti-queerness and patriarchal behaviour, which is something they have inherited from colonial religious powers.
There is a peculiar beauty to Neptune Frost. From the extraordinary costumes designed by Cedric Mizero, the neon-lit spaces of the production that ripple resplendent light on striking Black bodies (shot by Uzeyman), and Saul Williams’ unforgettable music which ranges from electronica to rap, to single voices singing, to choruses. The optimism and perseverance of Neptune Frost’s people comes not only from a fierce intelligence and a connection to mythologies that encompass the Universe itself, but the experience of being wholly themselves without interference from colonialism’s over-arching eye.
Neptune Frost is a stern rebuke to not only the Authority that exists in the mythical, yet all too real country, but also to the intruders who have made slaves of Black people for centuries. The film is also poetic and visually arresting – neon lights highlighting the Day-Glo makeup and costumes and filling Martyr Loser Kingdom with an otherworldly aesthetic. Williams and Uzeyman design a queer Afrofuturist odyssey that makes the audience applaud its unique vision and cheer on the dazzling hackers who show their middle finger to a sleeping world. Shining, unanimous goldmines for all!
