Directors Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams built Neptune Frost as something closer to a fever than a film, a 2022 Afrofuturist musical that treats coltan mining and computer code as two versions of the same extraction.
What is Neptune Frost about?
In a mining community stripped for the minerals that power the world's phones and laptops, an intersex hacker named Neptune and an escaped miner named Matalusa find each other and, through that meeting, begin to short-circuit the systems that exploit them both. The film moves in song rather than conventional dialogue for long stretches, following a coalition of runaway workers who build a hidden colony out of scavenged wire and stolen electricity, using it to reach into networks the world above assumes are secure. Neptune Frost sets this rebellion in Rwanda and Burundi and treats the digital and the mythic as the same register, blurring hacking, gender transformation and ancestral memory into one continuous act of refusal. It is less concerned with a linear plot than with building a world where resistance looks like music.
About the cast
Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo share the central roles across the story, joined by Bertrand Ninteretse, Eliane Umuhire and a wider ensemble including Rebecca Mucyo, Trésor Niyongabo, Eric Ngangare and Cecile Kayiregawa. The cast performs largely in song, with the ensemble carrying the film's rhythm as much as its plot.
Context & significance
Neptune Frost is a joint production between France, Rwanda and the United States, co-directed by playwright and performer Anisia Uzeyman alongside poet and musician Saul Williams, whose own music and writing shaped the film's sung structure. It arrived in 2022 as a sci-fi musical that draws on East African setting and history rather than the more familiar Western touchstones of the genre.
Watching Neptune Frost on Ktime
Neptune Frost is available on K-Time with a free account login, with no separate purchase needed to watch. The film includes Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking viewers a way into a film whose songs and dialogue move between languages even in the original version.