The Afrofuturist musical Neptune Frost has a bold, bizarre vision of the future

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the all-virtual grounds of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

“Maybe you’re asking yourself, WTF is this? Is it a poet’s idea of a dream?”

These are the first words spoken by Neptune Frost, the eponymous protagonist of Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams’ Afrofuturist musical, after a life-threatening motorbike collision, a miraculous revival, and a subsequent transformation. It’s a reasonable question, the type viewers may ask themselves at several points throughout the course of the film’s strange, circuitous odyssey.

Filmed and set in and around Rwanda and Burundi, Williams and Uzeyman’s “anti-capitalist cyber-musical” follows the story of itinerant intersex runaway Neptune Frost (portrayed at different times onscreen by Elvis Ngabo “Bobo” and Cheryl Isheja). Spurred by the loss of their mother, they embark on a journey of self-discovery and re-invention. Dogged by an oppressive police force known only as “The Authority,” Neptune is inexplicably drawn to a mysterious village cobbled together out of discarded e-waste, home to a small hacktivist enclave of revolutionaries and a coltan miner named Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse, a musician who performs as “Kaya Free”), who’s grieving the death of his younger brother Tekno. Together, the two form a bond that manifests as a power which threatens to upend the parasitic relationship between Western technology and the Global South. Also, there are musical numbers!

That’s a lot to throw at first-time viewers, let alone anyone unfamiliar with the fact that Neptune Frost is technically an adaptation of Williams’ 2016 concept album