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Buzzworthy

District 9: Exploring Apartheid through Sci-Fi
Less than 24 hours after losing oui on (he movie of his career, Neill Blomkamp found the other movie of his career
In 2006 Blomkamp, a young director of commercials and shorts, was plucked from obscurity to direct a big-budget feature based on (he best-selling Halo video games, endorsed by no less than Peter Jackson, the “Lord of the Rings" filmmaker. But weeks after Blomkamp was hired, the project was abruptly shelved by its Hollywood backers.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity he and Jackson devised a new film that is arguably just as ambitious.
At the start of that film, “District 9", an alien spacecraft stalls out in Earth's atmosphere, not over New York or Washington but over Johannesburg.
When its extraterrestrial passengers emerge, they are sequestered in a sprawling shantytown and shunned by even the lowest strata of human society. Amid an effort to relocate the creatures to a new camp, a corporate bureaucrat (played by Sharlto Copley) is infected with a virus that begins turning him into an alien, forcing him to confront his prejudices and his loyalties while he runs for his life.
If it all sounds like a science-fiction parable for South Africa's segregationist history, Blomkamp, 29, says that is no accident. "The whole film exists because of that,"he said.
Growing up in Johannesburg, Blomkamp was a visual effects prodigy who at 14 was already working alongside Copley at a computer graphics company. Though Blomkamp moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and Copley relocated to Cape Town, their memories of Johannesburg at the end of apartheid stayed with them.
Blomkamp described his hometown as "this amazing, racially charged, powder-kegcity -- an urban prison.”
Copley, 35, added that among his peers at that time, “there wasn't much political conversation."
“We were all just sheltered from what was going on,” he said, “and it was only looking back that you realised, God, that's how it was.”
Shot in Johannesburg in 2008 on a $30 million budget ("Halo" was rumoured to have one reaching $175 million or higher), “District 9" is Blomkamp's feature-length expansion of his short film “Alive in Joburg." Written by Blomkamp with Terri Tatchell, it offers familiar sci-fi, fantasy and horror conventions: the shaky cinema v^rite of "Cloverfield"; the colossal alien mother ships of "Independence Day"; the gooey metamorphosis of David Cronenberg's remake of "The Fly."
"1 was trying to make the science fiction feel vaguely familiar." Blomkamp said. "The South African component would be the alien component."
The plight of the film's crustacean-like extraterrestrials can be easily read as a
metaphor for the persecution of South African blacks under apartheid. But Blomkamp said he was also trying to comment on how the country’s impoverished peoples oppress one another. While "District 9" was being filmed in the Chiawelo section of Soweto, Alexandra and other townships were ravaged by outbursts of xenophobic violence perpetrated by indigenous South Africans upon illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe, Malawi and elsewhere.
Ultimately, Blomkamp said, the onus is on American moviegoers to acclimate ' themselves to unfamiliar ideas.
“The rest of the world has always been open to films from all over the place," he said. “The Americans have to, in the 21st century, start dealing with the fact Thai they may be watching popcorn films not from America.”
“Soon,” he said, “we’ll all be making films for the Chinese."
Compiled by Cultural Correspondent