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The best stories about a people’s collective anger and sadness are also about their love and joy. |Published on October 14, 2026
Credit: Swan Films
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Credit: Swan Films
Neptune Frost (2021) Directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman. Written by Saul Williams. Starring Elvis Ngabo, Cheryl Isheja, and Kaya Free
Every one of you, wherever you are in the world, is reading this article on some type of electronic device. It might be a phone or a tablet or a desktop computer. Or, I don’t know, maybe you browse the internet on the interactive screen of your internet-connected smart refrigerator, but if you are doing that you are making terrible life choices and you should rethink them immediately.
Regardless of what device you’re using, if you take it apart, you’ll find the circuit board that connects all the electronic parts of your device, and on that circuit board will be capacitors, which store and release electrical energy. And in most modern computer devices, those capacitors are made out of a metallic element called tantalum.
Most people who aren’t electrical engineers don’t have any reason to know anything about tantalum, even though we all use it every day. Its one of the transition metals that sits between hafnium and tungsten on the periodic table. It’s shiny and kinda boring grayish-blue in appearance. It’s nonreactive and extremely resistant to corrosion, which is what makes it useful in electronics and industry. It occurs naturally in the mineral tantalite, which forms in granitic rocks. If you take tantalite and substitute niobium for the tantalum, you get the mineral columbite, so the two minerals are so similar they often occur together in an ore named for both of them: coltan.
Depending on what kind of international news you read, you probably have heard something about coltan, if only indirectly. Coltan is one of the world’s most valuable “conflict resources,” or natural resources intrinsically linked to funding and prolonging warfare where they are produced. Most people know about diamonds, gold, and petroleum as conflict resources—everybody has heard of “blood diamonds”—but in the last few decades, as the world has become increasingly technology dependent, the list has expanded to include many things used in the manufacture of computer parts. Coltan is specifically linked to funding the civil wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s centered on (but not confined to) the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
To get into the details would be far beyond the scope of this article, but I think it’s important to understand that the systems behind conflict resources are complex and multinational. The people digging coltan out of the ground do not benefit from the global demand for tantalum. The mines are often owned and administered by foreign companies, which hire local workers for very little money, and those companies look the other way when the military and governmental groups skim materials to smuggle and sell to fund ongoing wars. The smuggling trade that runs alongside the “legitimate” corporate mining by foreign companies and during times of open warfare is so vast that it has reshaped the economies of the DRC and its many neighboring countries, but especially Rwanda and Uganda.
Another one of those neighbors is Burundi. Burundi is not a major source of coltan, because Burundi is not a major source of anything. It’s a small country—roughly the same size as the state of Massachusetts—and one of the poorest in the world by any measure. Its economy is mostly agricultural, and mostly subsistence, the only significant exports being coffee and tea. It does have a mining industry that extracts coltan, gold, and other valuable metals, but until very recently, foreign companies could hold contracts that would give them as much as 90% control of any mining operation. It’s only within the last five years that the government of Burundi began to change this in an attempt to keep more of the money made from mining within the country.
At this point, readers of this column likely fall into two different camps: those who have watched Neptune Frost and understand why I started with a summary of the economic context of valuable metals mining in East Africa, and those who have not yet watched and are wondering what the hell any of this has to do with a sci fi film. (I assume people who haven’t watched and are not curious have just stopped reading.)
Neptune Frost tells the story of Matalusa (Kaya Free), a young man who works with his brother in a coltan mind in Burundi. They and all the other young people are of a generation that were born and lived as children during Burundi’s long civil war, so every aspect of their lives is divided into during and after the war. After his brother is killed by a mine guard, Matalusa leaves and, guided by a dream, makes his way to a small village built out of discarded electronic junk.
There he encounters Neptune (played by Elvis Ngabo and Cheryl Isheja), who has an unexplained ability to affect technology with their mind. A group of rebel miners and hackers gather with them, and they begin disrupting the global internet as a way of drawing attention to the fact that the whole modern world is built on resources extracted from their land, by their hands, yet is pretending they are too primitive or backwards to benefit from it.
Neptune Frost is also a film that does not care to explain itself or its context to the audience. I think that’s a good thing. I love it when movies don’t explain things to me, because I love it when I watch something that makes me want to learn more about the world and a part of it I am unfamiliar with. The film doesn’t explain the geopolitics of coltan mining, the power that foreign corporations have over communities they know nothing about, the history of Burundi’s civil wars and genocides and how they tie into the civil wars and genocides in neighboring countries, the criminalization of homosexuality in East African nations driven largely by well-funded American evangelical groups, or the massive environmental problem of Western nations using African nations as technological waste dumps. It doesn’t explain any of that, but it’s all there in the movie, as part of the story and its context.
So let’s talk about how Neptune Frost came about.
Back in 2010, Rwandan actor and filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman and American rapper, poet, and actor Saul Williams met on the set of the French-language film Tey (or Aujourd’hui)(2012), which was being filmed in Senegal by French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis. Uzeyman and Williams fell in love and eventually married, and they began collaborating on their own films and projects. During a residency at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada, they developed a script for what they intended to be a stage musical with a related graphic novel. Script in hand, they met with Broadway producer Stephen Hendel, who along with his wife Ruth Hendel had produced the musical FELA!, which is about the life and music of Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.
It was Hendel who suggested they develop the story as a film instead. They were hesitant at first, as it wasn’t what they had imagined, but they came around to the idea. But they knew that this was not the sort of project where handing over control to a studio would work out, so they sought independent funding, including some from a Kickstarter campaign that was boosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda, a guy known for having a fondness for political musicals.
As Williams put it in a 2022 interview, “Once we thought about it, though, and realized what could happen if we got out of the way, that we would have the opportunity to work with all of this talent to show new faces and to shoot on location.”
But that would prove to be a bit difficult. Williams and Uzeyman had always imagined the story taking place in Burundi, but it was not possible for them to film in Burundi when production began in 2016. To be clear, people do make movies in Burundi; people make movies everywhere. But in 2016, the country was roiled by political upheaval that had sparked in 2015 when then-president Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would run for a third term, although the country’s constitution allowed only two terms. The announcement led to widespread demonstrations, a failed military coup, and multiple violent attacks and political assassinations. The outbreak of violence and fears of another civil war led to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the country.
Because they could not film in Burundi, the filmmakers went instead to Rwanda, Uzeyman’s home country, where she had long wanted to make a film. This was the next best option geographically—Rwanda and Burundi have similar landscapes and mutually intelligible languages—but also in terms of recruiting the cast, because Rwanda is home to a large number of Burundian refugees.
(Quick aside to simplify a small part of the ugly, sprawling tangle of African colonial history: Rwanda and Burundi were separate kingdoms largely inhabited by people from the same population groups—namely, the Hutu and Tutsi—until European colonists decided they were a single Belgian territory. The joint colonial rule lasted from World War I until 1962, after which the two nations became independent. But their politics and populations have always been intertwined, in large part because the power structures and conflicts, including the civil wars and genocides in both nations, are divided along Hutu-Tutsi lines, which do not necessarily correspond to where borders are drawn on the maps.)
In the Rwandan capital city of Kigali, they began searching for their cast and crew among both local film and arts communities and the large community of Burundian refugees that included artists, activists, and musicians. They found Rwandan fashion designer Cedric Mizero, who fashioned the wonderfully vibrant costumes for the film. They attended a performance by Burundian actor Kaya Free, and afterward cast him as the film’s lead character, Matalusa. Free’s friend, Trésor Niyongabo (who plays Psychology), took them to play soccer one day and introduced them to a group of refugee Burundian drummers, who are the drummers we see throughout the film.
Quite a lot of the film developed in this open, adaptable, community-focused way. Although Rwanda does have a small but active film industry, there was a lot the production needed to build from scratch, not just to light and film the movie, but to create its film’s more science fictional and dreamlike elements. Part of the inspiration for the film’s setting and costuming came from the prevalence of electronic waste dumps throughout Africa, and a lot of the props and costumes were crafted from discarded or recycled materials. Or, sometimes, they used repurposed art pieces, such as the wooden sculptures that serve as the weapons carried by Innocent (Dorcy Rugamba) and various soldiers and police officers.
The story also evolved as the production progressed. The introduction of the Burundian drummers changed the music, which in turn changed the rhythm and pacing of the scenes. Williams and Uzeyman also talk about how meeting Free’s mother and speaking to her about Burundian folklore influenced the way they wrote the character of Neptune, who is an intersex person with a fluid outward gender presentation.
Even though the initial scouting and planning started in 2016, they wouldn’t return to film the movie until 2020, finishing just before the COVID-19 pandemic began closing borders. Nothing about this film happened quickly except the actual filming, which took only about a month after years of conceptualization, writing, adapting, composing, and planning. It was a long, slow labor of love to bring it all together.
I do think it’s accurate to describe this film as a musical, but it’s not the sort of musical where music is confined to song-based set pieces. Music, song, and rhythm weave in and out of nearly all the scenes, and the dialogue is often written and delivered in ways that intentionally blur the line between talking and singing. Williams is, after all, a slam poet and a rapper; wordplay as performance is one of his art forms. He wrote the poem “Coltan as Cotton” while developing the ideas that would become Neptune Frost, and the poem is incorporated into the film.
Williams and Uzeyman worked with both Rwandan and Burundian poets and writers to translate their initial screenplay into Kinyarwanda (the national language of Rwanda) and Kirundi (the national language of Burundi). The two languages are mutually intelligible dialects of the same group; they are also both tonal languages, which is obvious just from listening to the film’s dialogue—even if, like me, you don’t think you’ve ever properly heard these languages before.
The effect of combining dialects with different tonal qualities, poetry translated across multiple languages, and multiple styles of song is incredible. There are small quirks that build the world—the common greeting of “Unanimous Goldmine” is one example—and there are beautiful, looping linguistic flights of lyricism that carry us through the characters’ ideas and ideals. The impact builds through the film as more voices, more ideas, more emotions get involved. At the beginning, I wasn’t sure what to make of either the story or the style, but before long I was captivated, and by the time we reach the tragic, infuriating end I was fully invested. This is a movie that fully gets under the skin in the best way.
It’s a strange, powerful film with a queer romance, a captivating and lyrical voice, and a very clear political message. It’s both angry and loving, sad and joyful, because the best stories about a people’s collective anger and sadness are also about their love and joy. The story focuses on one small group of people in one often overlooked nation, but it is also an expansive look at the ongoing colonialist exploitation of people and resources. It is crafted specifically to confront the stereotype that people living in poor African nations don’t know or aren’t connected to the modern technological world. There are elements of the film that are dreamy, even touching on mystical, and there are scenes that are disorienting, especially when the lines between reality, dream, and computer space are deliberately blurred. But the film itself is not dreamlike or drifting. Every scene and every choice is far too intentional for that.
This is not a film for an audience that wants absolute scientific rationality, nor is it for an audience that would rather go on not thinking about who is being exploited and harmed to build the technological marvels of our modern world. For example: At some point the characters shout “Fuck Mr. Google!” and at another point, a character says, “We power systems more effectively than we destroy them.” And as the film goes on, there are more and more moments where the characters break the fourth wall to directly address the audience.
My favorite of these is when we see a kiss between Matalusa and Neptune that is obviously leading to an intimate scene, right before Neptune flips off the camera and the scene changes, blocking us, the audience, from being able to watch more. It’s the perfect way of saying: Yes, you get our minerals and our blood, our labor and our pain, but you do not get to be voyeurs of our love and pleasure.
What do you think of Neptune Frost? What about its music and fantastic visual style?
Next week: I hope nobody was expecting a cheerful vision of the future next week, because we’re watching Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Find it online. icon-paragraph-end
About the Author
Kali Wallace
Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults, including the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award winner Dead Space. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Reactor, and other speculative fiction magazines. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com. Learn More About Kali African SFF Neptune Frost Science Fiction Science Fiction Film Club Subscribe Connect with Login I allow to create an account When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account. DisagreeAgree Connect with I allow to create an account When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account. DisagreeAgree 1 Comment Oldest Newest Most Voted
Spender
21 hours ago
Never heard of this one, thanks for the tip!
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