I entered Neptune Frost knowing nothing more about it other than that it was set in Burundi, and that Lin Manuel Miranda was executive producing it. The title, Neptune Frost, said very little about what the film was about, and the vague poster didn’t help either. There had to be a reason an acclaimed filmmaker of Miranda’s calibre could be attached to an East African project released in 2022, and yet no one was talking about it, at least not in a major way to reach my ear.
Neptune Frost follows a rebellious hacking collective that attempts a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region’s natural resources, and its people. The first few scenes could fool one into believing that this film would end up like every other indie African film, with a shallow depiction of the rural lifestyle and the toils and hardships of a poverty-stricken community and drama about revenge plots or family feuds. The African drama staple. The film steals your attention almost immediately, with music and visuals blending into one another. The image of the purity of religion is quickly questioned. And the wails of a miner gripping the lifeless body of this brother are quickly drowned in tribal drums as the rest of the miners alternate between imperfectly choreographed dancing and digging. It’s very clear very early on that this film has no intention of being ordinary. Yet everything about it is African. The oversized, worn-out suits, the bloodshot eyes, the long, expansive rural land covered with lush green foliage, the faces, the language. The same tap that has become synonymous with low-budget Nollywood films – playing out cultural and traditional little dramas fully committed to the point that they spare time and effort to make visual effects for supernatural plot points – is now in the hands of people who don’t want to simply entertain; they want to stir a conversation.
What follows is a musical like no other, African at its core yet morphing seemingly and seamlessly through western influences, both in sound and ideas, trying to find a comforting middle ground but aware of the impossibility. The voice of the narrative speaks in beautiful poetry uttered in the language of the people of Burundi. Bantu words occasionally pop into recognition as a subtle reminder of how close we are to these people, and the rest is a mixture of the native Burundian tongue, English, and traces of French. With deep poetry that describes in detail thoughts and feelings so intuitive and foreign, I find myself wondering if words for ideas such as “a light year” or “the subconscious mind” exist in our native tongue. Do we have ways to express concepts that were unknown or undiscovered, when our languages were being forged? Will the people of Burundi listening to the words I’ve read under the subtitles of Neptune Frost actually hear the beauty and poetic enchantment of this film, or is this film meant for those that will read the subtitles?
Neptune Frost is directed by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Stacey Williams. The former is a Rwandan playwright, and the latter is an American grand slam poet, rapper, and instrumentalist. Whatever was to splatter between the hands of these two was going to be messy, but the two found a way to balance a mixture of theatre-structured scenes in between clouds of lucid, hyperreal, and melodic dreams. Every department chimed in to make a visual, afro-futuristic depiction of Africa. From a jacket made of keyboard buttons to little ways to shift perspectives in the lighting and camera movements, every scene and every moment is given ample care and time to fully realise itself, creating what feels like an intrusive dream or a really cool-looking 2 hour music video.
Neptune Frost feels like it’s set at the right time, in not just human history but African history too. Where questions of identity and sexuality are starting to crop up in Africa, albeit under strict opposition from the church and state, and where questions of neocolonialism in the commercialism of our natural resources, questions about the anxiety over the rise of artificial intelligence, and questions about the brutality and overpowered police force among our societies. The film weaves all these questions inside itself, in ways both inventive and, for the most part, disorienting. A disorientation that the film welcomes as it blurs the lines between expressionism and abstractionism, questioning its own existence while pushing the bounds beyond anything the audience would have expected. It has no intention to give answers, and it uses this realisation as a weapon to exhaust every visual, audible, and narrative moment to fully embrace the ambiguity of its existence. As a musical, it finds ways to mix electric guitars and tribal drums, lay electronic music over slow melodic singing, and convey deep sentiments over broken raps and choruses. This is not a film that picks you up at the airport and drives you around for a runtime of one hour and forty minutes, telling you everything that’s happening around you. This film throws you out of a speeding airplane and lets you figure out how to land.
Where it lands for me is at a point where I recognise its existence as a rather huge milestone for Africa. Art exists to question reality, and history is littered with all kinds of rebellious artistic expression. Neptune Frost feels like the first one I’ve seen that shouts in an African language, at least for social and economic history and not politics. Which then begs the question why African expatriates have to be the ones to tell these African stories. They have grown to huge success in their own rights outside of our continent, and they are good enough storytellers to conjure a perfect synchrony of the plots, the looks, the feels, the actors, and their culture, and they do it so well. But for whom? I doubt a film like this would be enjoyed by most people, so it’s not made for the people of Burundi, at least not the majority of them. It’s made for film and music lovers to see a new way of telling a musical story, it’s made for some to support a cause or two by watching the loud African film, but it’s also made because some brilliant filmmakers came together and wanted to draw their names into our history, knowingly or otherwise. So is it just another case of someone building on the back of our culture and stories to make a beautiful film about their perspective and opinions? And even if they are, should we be surprised when we don’t seem to want to associate with the same culture and stories in our own films? Because they might have made a masterpiece that, though flawed, might go down as the start of a new way of consuming African stories. But we have the likes of Uganda’s Loukman Ali, so maybe we are safe?
