Wednesday, March 29th – Sunday, April 2nd
I’m about to write about a musical. If you are, like me, musical tolerant, let’s keep rocking. If you’re not, please, stick around because I swear this one is different. Not like The Book of Mormon different, but like radically really different.
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist punk musical co-directed by poet, artist, and musician Saul Williams and actress, director, and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman. (They’re married.) It’s set in the hills of Burundi among a radical computer hacker collective. The film weaves new and old sci-fi tropes, images, and sounds into an anti-colonial film that people around the world have received with acclaim.
And a lot of local forces are coming together to screen this film: The Northwest Film Forum will play Neptune Frost at its Capitol Hill theater in collaboration with the University of Washington and the Black Cinema Collective. These showings precede an April 1st performance of Motherboard Suite, a musical performance created by Williams, at UW’s Meany Center. Black Cinema Collective, formed at UW Bothell in 2019, is a Seattle-based group celebrating African and Afro-diasporic film through a Black global lens. Like this lens that the collective is advancing, Neptune Frost asks for participation from its community of viewers to imagine another world.
Performed in English, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, and French with English subtitles,Ā Neptune Frost‘sĀ multilingual natureĀ harkens to the global impact of Williams’ work and the home nation of Rwandan co-director Uzeyman. While discussing the film with Nigerian critic Wilfred Okiche, Uzeyman described capturing her home with the camera as “a gesture of love.” A beautiful sentiment that should be seen to be understood.
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