This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a special programmer’s preview of the 21st Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, our annual series featuring a diverse and extensive lineup of contemporary Italian films. Join FLC Assitant Programmer Dan Sullivan in an overview of the hidden gems in this year’s festival, taking place June 9 – 15. Click here to explore the lineup and filmmaker Q&As, and get tickets.

After the preview, listen to a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman on their Main Slate selection Neptune Frost, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez.

Multi-hyphenate, multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams brings his unique dynamism to this Afrofuturist vision, a sci-fi punk musical that’s a visually wondrous amalgamation of themes, ideas, and songs that Williams has explored in his work, notably his 2016 album MartyrLoserKing. Co-directed with his partner, the Rwandan-born artist Anisia Uzeyman, the film takes place amidst the hilltops of Burundi, where a collective of computer hackers emerges from within a coltan mining community, a result of the romance between a miner and an intersex runaway. Set between states of being—past and present, dream and waking life, colonized and free, male and female, memory and prescience—Neptune Frost is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends. Neptune Frost is now playing in select theaters.

Watch/listen to the discussion below and don’t forget to subscribe on iTunesSpotify, or Stitcher for more filmmaker conversations.