Johannesburg, South Africa in District 9

Neill Blomkamp didn’t look too far from home when producing his debut feature, District 9, a sci-fi thriller that has taken the US box office by storm and promises to do the same on these shores. The rookie director was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa and the 29-year-old has travelled back to his hometown to bring to the big screen his vision of immigrant aliens clashing with the native humans. And District 9 is a distinctly South African movie through and through, from it title to its themes, from its cast and crew to its locations.

To those unfamiliar with the geography of South Africa, District Six was once an inner-city area in Cape Town which, under the country’s apartheid government, forcibly removed a population of 60,000 residents to create a ‘whites only’ area. This idea of a displaced and unwanted community feeds into the movie, as aliens arrive in Johannesburg, only to be housed in a government camp called District 9. This area soon deteriorates and becomes nothing more than an overcrowded slum of unwanted non-humans.

Blomkamp maintains that neither his home country’s past, nor Johannesburg’s present, which is dogged by conflict between native South Africans and illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries, consciously influenced his writing, politics taking a back-seat to full-on action. “I’m not trying to be overly metaphorical or have any preachy lessons or any political standpoint other than I grew up in that environment,” he says. However, he does concede that there are undeniable parallels. “There is no difference except that in my film we had a group of intergalactic aliens as opposed to illegal aliens.”