Neptune Frost – RMA + Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2021)
Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman • 105' • Rwanda
*On March 22nd, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam doors open for AiRich exhibition at 19:15 until 20:30 when the film starts.
The program (talk + film screening) will be in English.*
About the talk
On March 22nd, before the film screening of Neptune Frost (2021) by Saul Williams & Anisia Uzeyman, a talk takes place with artist AiRich, lecturer and researcher Afro-Dutch studies Zawdie Sandvliet and moderator Jennifer Muntslag.
(AiRich)
About the film
The multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical mixing 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.
Matalusa works under inhuman conditions in a coltan mine in Rwanda when his brother gets brutally killed in front of his eyes. This traumatic event drives him to change. He decides to leave the mine and enters a daydreaming anti-capitalist cyber dimension. There, he meets a collective of hackers led by Neptune, a non-binary person who aims to disrupt capitalism and colonialism in a universe where concepts such as gender and sexuality are fluid.
Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience, Neptune Frost (2021) judges, deconstructs, and disrupts the binary and the systems of power present in contemporary society. How? By hacking the internet and screaming to the world that something has to change. The Afrofuturistic musical transports you into a utopian world made of electronic beats and visual ecstasy. The red and blue neon lights caress the black skin of the collective members and enhance their atypical clothes made of technological detritus such as a textured keyboard cloak.
