Having premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival as part of its Directors' Fortnight, a colorful new sci-fi Hip Hop musical called Neptune Frost started branching out from its limited release this week, distribution courtesy of Kino Lorber. Co-written and directed by the Rwandan artist and filmmaker Anisia Ozeyman and the American poet-musician Saul Williams, the film is set in Ozeyman's home country, though whether this is the Rwanda of the future or the Rwanda of an alternate present isn't quite clear.
The narrative is structured around two parallel stories that converge upon each other. In the first, a young queer Rwandan man named Neptune (Elvis Ngabo) is forced to flee his village after he fights off (and potentially kills) a local priest attempting to molest him. Coming to the city, he is mortally wounded in a freak collision with a motor scooter, only to be reincarnated through some kind of techno-shamanism as a feminine-presenting intersex cyborg, the role now taken up by Cheryl Isheja. In the second story, a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse) suffers the murder of his brother at the hands of the paramilitary guards who compel him and his brethren to dig up the special metals used in computer technology, which, in the film, both take on quasi-magical properties. Grief-stricken, he too chooses to flee and wander the countryside, only to be visited in a dream by a strange avatar who cryptically prophecies his forthcoming role in a spiritual awakening. Neptune and Matalusa's paths eventually lead them to a small camp protected by an invisible forcefield, where a radical collective of hackers plots to signal-boost a decentralized rebellion against the tyrannical, West-sponsored government known as "The Authority." Neptune and Matalusa (whose name is vulgarized as "MartyrLoser") become lovers, a kind of non-binary Adam and Eve whose unity proves to be the key to manifesting the spiritual properties of the coltan and gives the collective the power to jam global communications systems. But in a story replete with allusions to Judeo-Christian mythology, especially the Old Testament, spiritual exuberance soon degenerates into doubt, taboos, and familial in-fighting, rendering the once proud new micro-nation vulnerable to destruction at the hands of the modern Babylon.
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"We really wanted for you to be able to enter a world that you have never seen before," said Ozeyman, speaking at a Q&A hosted by Stephanye R. Watts of the Be Reel Black Cinema Club following a screening of Neptune Frost at Philadelphia's Ritz Five this Tuesday. She and Williams first began conceptualizing the film as a stage production as early as 2013. This was before executive producer Stephen Hendel (who previously brought Bill T. Jones and Jim Lewis's Fela! to Broadway) suggested they'd find more financial interest in the project if it were done as a motion picture. Shot on location in Rwanda - with a cast and crew composed almost entirely of artists from the African continent - the film draws upon movements that have sprung up around the reality of resource extraction and labor exploitation that powers communications systems.
"The impetus for a lot of the film," Williams elaborated, "came in a moment when Anisia and I discovered the phenomena of e-waste camps, which is where a lot of our tech goes to die." All over Africa, though especially in Central and West Africa, there are villages where all our outmoded or surplus laptops, computer towers, hard drives, and keyboards are dumped and burned in massive piles, releasing poison gasses that prove to be cause-leaders in poor air quality and public health for the surrounding inhabitants, to say nothing of the poorly paid laborers (if they are paid at all) tasked with reducing this plastic and metal runoff to a tarry black cinder. "Often-times, the planes that come in with the "e-waste" come out with the resources," added Williams; which is to say, with all of the metallic and mineral materials, such as coltan and tantalite, that serve as essential raw materials for the empire of specialized consumer electronics.
It is on the periphery of this cycle that Uzeyman and Williams first encountered the phenomenon of "up-cycling," in which innovative African entrepreneurs and artists have taken up the pieces of waste returned to them, manufactured from resources plundered from their open nations, and have re-made them into functional machines, or incorporated them into pieces of avant garde fashion and visual art. Williams described exploring Rwanda in 2016 as he and Uzeyman were shooting the "sizzler reel" for the project's Kickstarter campaign, and meeting a local artist named Cedric Mizero, who was only in his early-20's but had founded his own artists' collective for the production of "zero-waste creations." Williams recounted explaining the concept of the film to Mizero, who came back to the filmmakers the next day with "sandals made of motherboards." Once pre-production was under way in November, 2019, Mizero and collaborator Antoine Nshimiyimana were leading the production design for the film, Uzeyman and Williams opting to build up the production entirely from the independents artists and technicians they had assembled in their travels, rather than flying in talent from France or South Africa. (With film production, as with the tech cycle, the normal channels tend to put far less into African communities than they take out and capitalize upon.) Rounding out the production's look was the creative direction of the cast's hair and make-up as provided by Tanya Melendez, better know to some as L.A.'s "Lady Soul Fly". Principal photography took place from February 3 through March 4 of 2020, Uzeyman and Williams narrowly ducking under the gate just as the world was locking down with 40 hours of rushes. This indicates a very narrow shooting ratio for a film of its length, even given its low budget, and especially because it is a musical; or, better yet, a Hip Hop operetta. "Everything was really, really precise," Uzeyman explained, "and we had a very tight schedule... So there was not enough place or time for anything unexpected, or improvisation. And, you know, it was all a question of resourcefulness."
Resourcefulness is certainly the spirit that inflects the look and feel of Neptune Frost. As with this year's other great pseudo-theatrical film, Qiu Jiongjiong's A New Old Play, Uzeyman and Williams' production is built around a "simple craft approach," where Mizero's rather ingeniously lo-fi sets and costumes paradoxically contrast with and compliment the swirling futurism of Melendez's hair and make-up choices, as well as Williams' own texturally dense musical compositions and soundscapes. The results are a future that, in a very immediate sense, isn't quite a future at all, but a kind of heightened impression of the present; one that is, as always, both haunted and blessed by visions of future possibilities, just as it is haunted and blessed by the recapitulating ghosts and prophecies of the past. This is not a realist production, but one in which the filmmakers embrace the financial and structural limitations of their commitment to ethical filmmaking, and the empowerment of their cast and crew, in order to present something that, in its irresolvable artificiality, imprints upon the spectator the idea that the story of the film is as much as anything about the making and existence of the film itself. For instance, in order to represent a dove flying, the filmmakers have opted to simply hold the bird right up to the lens, the camera panning with the stationary animal. Performers, especially during the film's climax, will sometimes look directly into Uzeyman's camera, and not in that way that musical performers routinely sing to and exhibit themselves before the audience. Rather in a subtly tense and inquisitive way, they return the gaze as if to ask, "Who, actually, is watching this? Who are you, and what is your relationship to the people whose signal you are receiving?"
Appropriate to Uzeyman's desire to introduce spectators to "a place, a people, a story that we don't have a lot of reference to," Neptune Frost plays not unlike a cryptic (or encrypted) message from the far-side of even the West's most morbid dystopias. One could say that the film takes place in the shadow of the bourgeois death drive that obsessed Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future. Or, perhaps too cheekily, one could also say that it fleshes out the geography (and humanity) left blank by South African expat Neill Blomkamp's urban-centric action spectacles. But I have a feeling that Williams and Uzeyman might consider Neptune Frost more of a sister act to Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell films, from which it not only borrows narrative inspiration, but also a more philosophically and spiritually meditative tone. At any rate, here is Rwanda, the blue heart from which all of that precious circuitry of our own decadence and enslavement originates, but in a future that, as with all our projections of the future, seems to be collapsing completely into our present, rendering Neptune Frost both a boundary pushing and surreal musical, as well as a pseudo-documentary and unapologetic showcase of its cast of young and old pioneers of a new futurism.
But there's also a fitting irony to the filmmakers' ambitions to build up and show us a world to which many audiences, especially in the Occidental West, lack a point of reference, whereas the sci-fi mythology that they construct is rather resonant and familiar. I have no doubt that there are points of mythical, spiritual, and archetypal reference that I am not in the best position to tease apart. But what I found so stimulating about Neptune Frost was its invective variation on a pervasive theme in black diaspora fantasy art, which concerns the tensions, conflicts, and syntheses between the indigenous spiritualities of colonized and enslaved peoples, and then the historical imposition of the Abrahamic religions of the colonizer. With rap and slam poetry as Williams' primary means of lyrical delivery, there is no subtlety to the characters' consciousness of themselves as not merely vague libertarians (as is most common in Western dystopian fantasy) but as rather more nuanced and particular ideological actors who are rejecting economic exploitation at its base, but also the whole (holy) host of patriarchal and heterosexist values that are co-morbid with the history of coercive colonial relationships. In metaphorical terms, they are the subjects of a historical process that has deracinated them from an awareness of themselves and their connection to their own land, the raw materials feeding the West's vast communications regime discovered to be literally divine objects. When Matalusa raps to his followers about rejecting the "old books" of the Authority, those that tell them to deny the divine feminine in all of them, separating people into repressive sexual and gender binaries, there can be no confusion about what "old books" he is talking about.
At the same time, though, the "new book" as articulated by the spiritual journey undertaken by these characters proves evocatively codependent upon the symbolic stamina of the old book itself. What you have with Neptune Frost is no less than a jumbled-up, encrypted Techno-Torah, complete with flights from slavery, wanderings in the wilderness, prophetic dreams and revelations of the heavenly host (Mizero's craft machines and Melendez's spiraling hair designs reinterpreting Biblical descriptions of angels as polymorphous beings of blinding light and wheeling fire), and, finally, the founding and tragic exile from a Promised Land. Uzeyman and Williams' new old testament might unambiguously agitate for a rejection of patriarchal values, but it is also informed by a deep nostalgia for how even imposed spirituality and myths can themselves become indigenous. There might even be an angle on Neptune Frost that is very much about not getting caught up in the facetious authenticity (or false prophecy) of the "new," just as its queer feminist interpretation of Abrahamic myth rejects binaries between man and woman, and just as its aesthetic and ethical commitments reject conventional realism.
Aside from intellectual stimulation, though, it must be said that Neptune Frost is just plain cool. The combination of Williams' music and Uzeyman's cinematography doesn't always substantiate their cryptic approach to storytelling, and, indeed, I'd say that there are times where the film totally drags with its own obscurantism. That said, Williams did at one point during the Q&A describe it all as "a love song for the people who are in it; for the people who can understand it without subtitles." (Five languages are spoken in the film.) And I think there's something to be said for that. Against the supposed transcendent universality of art, space is warranted for the international cinema that acknowledges that there are some spectators' whose role in the reception and interpretation of art is more observational and alien than it is for others. Neptune Frost is very much a film that talks to its audience, and depending upon who that audience member is, a single bar of Williams' verse can come to mean two incredibly different things. Art is always, most of all, for the outsiders. And yet there are still just some art pieces that do a better job than others of reminding the viewer of their status "outside" the art itself, and in such a way where a love and beauty is still preserved.
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