Juneteenth Screening: Neptune Frost + Featured Poet
In honor of Juneteenth, join us for a special screening of Neptune Frost, followed by a conversation panel with alongside Dark Matter Resident Amari Amai.
Set in a futuristic e-waste camp between dreamscape and revolution, Neptune Frost is a visionary Afro-futurist musical that blends technology, liberation, gender expansiveness, spirituality, and resistance. Directed by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, the film imagines a world where those pushed to the margins become architects of a new future.
Through stunning visuals, music, and poetic storytelling, Neptune Frost asks urgent questions about extraction, freedom, collective power, and the possibilities of self-determination. As we commemorate Juneteenth—a celebration of Black liberation and an ongoing reflection on freedom's unfinished work—the film offers a powerful lens through which to consider the intersections of technology, identity, memory, and resistance.
Following the screening, a featured poet will respond to themes from the film, creating space for reflection, dialogue, and collective imagining.
Film: Neptune Frost (2021)
Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes
Genre: Afro-futurist Musical / Science Fiction / Experimental Cinema
Come prepared for a cinematic experience that is as much a poem as it is a film—one that invites us to dream beyond the systems we inherit and imagine the worlds we might build together.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Amari Amai (he/they) is a Black nonbinary storyteller, poet, playwright, educator, and worldbuilder born and raised in Chicago. As a Great Migration baby with roots in Jackson, Mississippi, Amari’s work is rooted in oral tradition and archival resurrection on and off the page, using poetry, folklore, soundscapes, and performance to bend time towards a pre-colonial past and decolonized future. Their work has received support and fellowships from Tin House, Periplus Collective, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Earthseed Black Family Archive Project, Hyde Park Art Center, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and Celebration Theater of Los Angeles. Amari is the founder of Crossroads Writers Collective, a communal writing group for Black queer folks based in Chicago. As a 2025 Pushcart Prize and 2026 Best of the Net nominee, they are currently at work on their debut poetry collection and accompanying performance series.