Neptune Frost (with French subtitles)

PRESENTED AS PART OF THE EXHIBITION SEEING LOUD AN CLEAR: BASQUIAT AND MUSIC

Co-directed by New York musician and slammer Saul Williams, who lent his voice to Jean-Michel Basquiat's film DOWNTOWN 81, NEPTUNE FROST is a musicalafrofuturist comedy in which the meeting between a coltan miner and an intersex person leads to an anti-colonial rebellion. In this sci-fi film premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, time mixes and music mingles with hacking around a cosmic love story.

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with the Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region's natural resources – and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry. Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience – NEPTUNE FROST is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.