DISTRICT 9 - The genesis of Neill Blomkamp's dystopian allegory

I'm old enough now that I can draw circles around genres which once excited publishers and Hollywood agents, but which were just as quickly discarded. Can you recall for instance, the sinister South African gangsters and rogue Apartheid agents who once populated movies like Lethal Weapon 2 and books like VORTEX the Larry Bond thriller?
The genre exploded in the late 1980s when the Soviet Union collapsed and fiction producers were suddenly desperate to find a viable alternative to the KGB. The nemesis for the 90s had to be a viable stereotype, and one which was hated by a broad demographic. Apartheid-era South Africans were perceived as vile villains who fit the Bill. They were after all, sophisticated, cunning, privileged and desperate to survive.

Well sir, our world changed too quickly. The mafia emerged as the new Russian strongmen and Muslim terrorists were a gift to our pop culture, scarier than the KGB ever was. As for the Republic of South Africa, the A.N.C. regime is already into its third president and a couple of million black kids were born under A.N.C. slogans and promises. Those who didn't like "the New South Africa" simply left, and now constitute an extremely tame diaspora in their adoptive countries. That said, a South African born Canadian has just crafted his first feature film, and his unique vision might trigger something akin to a new genre. That would be fun !Where CHARLIE JADE , the Canadian-funded South African television series failed, perhaps DISTRICT 9 the riskier Science Fiction - allegory may just succeed in stirring our imagination.

In 2005 Neill Blomkamp and friends crafted a six minute short called ALIVE IN JOBURG. The server couldn't keep up with the demand and the film became an Internet phenomenon. Peter Jackson was impressed and invited Blomkamp to try the creative atmosphere in New Zealand.

PART ONE: Original Sin

Neill Blomkamp arrived in Vancouver, B.C. with a South African high school diploma and a burgeoning talent for computer graphics. It seems he was not born with "original sin" as his family had avoided the taint of active participation in the organs of "White Rule". Neill never could wash the R.S.A. out of his hair, and so after some training here in computer VFX he secured steady employment and made it a personal priority to return to his native land each summer and discuss creative collaboration with young filmmakers who had stayed behind.

My research into Blomkamp's life shows that he has surprising depth, and that he will not shy from social issues that would crucify less sure men. With this movie, DISTRICT 9, Blomkamp is engaging in political allegory every bit as clever and biting as George Orwell pulled off with ANIMAL FARM several decades ago. We are witnessing a creative concept which is unique and possibly significant.

A production still from DISTRICT 9, a low budget Science Fiction - Allegory produced by Director Peter Jackson. The movie goes into general release on August 14. The INDEPENDENCE DAY type Alien spacecraft of Blomkamp's 2005 short, has been replaced by vessels equally sinister looking.

When SONY announced this project back in November of 2007, I was impressed by Blomkamp's tenacity and skill at getting the "Big Boys" to trust his creative judgement. The Fan Blogs are currently busy scraping up every studio dangle or minute clue needed to assemble a prediction of what this movie will look like. It is clear that the viral marketing campaign for the film has only succeeded in creating confusion, which is never a good thing in marketing. (see for example this site) A few leaked photos from the production show us a small outdoor set representing the entrance gate to DISTRICT 9. They confirm that production money was very tight, as does the Casting which was also very low budget.

We were told that Blomkamp co-wrote the DISTRICT 9 script with "his partner" Terri Tatchell. Now that's rather extraordinary. Blomkamp is certainly a wunderkind, but Ms. Tatchell has no S.F. track record whatsoever, except in her relations with Blomkamp. Tatchell attended the Vancouver Film School in 2001, earning her diploma in Writing for Film, Television & New Media. She then got a job at Rainmaker Studio under the late Bob Scarabelli, and was designated as Rainmaker's "Industry Relations Co-ordinator". At the same time she joined the Board of the Vancouver chapter of Women in Film and Television. (She served one term as its President but is no longer a member.) This thumbnail photo, which dates to 2003, is still archived on the WIFTV web page:It was at Rainmaker that Terri met Neill, who was then employed in VFX. She has no experience with Science Fiction and probably no cultural knowledge of South Africa beyond what she has picked up through Neill. Tatchell's best known creative effort is actually a stage play written for high school students, which is added to the curriculum of some schools because it teaches kids about the legal fight to gain Canadian women the vote. It's called "Woman Idiot Lunatic Criminal" and tells the story of a girl transported back to 1910 to meet her Suffragette great-grandmother. (The story takes its name from the awkward wording of the Canada Elections Act of 1918.) I'm not trying to pick on the lady but the truth is that while Neill was sequestered for most of last year directing the movie, Tatchell was back here in B.C. involved in her own thing. I can't believe she added much to the movie project, but who knows?

In PART TWO of this article I plan to comment on some of the creative aspects of DISTRICT 9.

UPDATE: It seems that the makers of DISTRICT 9 have themselves shill over on Wikipedia. In my naivete (When will I EVER learn?) I decided to contribute a few helpful sentences to the Wiki page that was created for this flic. In FOUR minutes some creepy wiki-guardian had removed my contribution. Some techno-Hobbit down in New Zealand perhaps.

ALIVE IN JOBURG

Neill Blomkamp's bitterly ironic satire of life in the "New" South Africa, ALIVE IN JOBURG, debuted on the Internet as a free download, in November 2005. One of the most successful promotional campaigns in recent memory, the six minute video, a CGI apprentice-piece, has made young Blomkamp a name brand. That was the whole idea.

We will begin with a look at the film, and in later Blogs explore how Blomkamp placed his own star in the entertainment firmament.

Review:

ALIVE IN JOBURG was a hit the moment it was uploaded to the Internet in November of 2005. How I missed its release I really cannot say, but fortunately I stumbled upon it in October 2006. A third year architecture student had pawned off responsibility for writing of a couple of his term papers. As I did the preparatory reading, a new term – the “Carceral state” popped up. I found it in an article on militarized landscapes, which led me directly to Neill Blomkamp’s film. It said his video depicted “post-apartheid carceral territoriality”. (For an explanation of the term, here’s a Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carceral_state ).

The story behind this clever video will be told in a later Blog article. Suffice it today to simply repeat Blomkamp’s remark that it was part of a “well crafted plan” to reinvent himself as someone capable of directing feature films. The jury is still out, but he seems to have pulled it off.

Neill Blomkamp is now a Canadian, but he retains the fund of knowledge and acquired passions of a white African. Having been raised to adulthood and educated in the Republic of South Africa, he is sensitive to the culture and history, and acutely aware of the dangerous political currents which can sink any artistic project which does not defer to the tenets of the ANC social program.

In the six minute film he posits a country struggling under the burden of a massive influx of aliens, who have thrown up squatter camps, are illegally tapping into the infrastructure and overwhelming the public services. (Illegal migrant populations are a challenge common to most African cities, and in part, contributed the creation of the Apartheid system decades ago). The aliens in ALIVE IN JOBURG have secured a beach-head and play the host society against itself, pleading their case before a TV audience. They are competing with local citizens for scarce resources, worsening a pre-existing social crisis, and the hapless authorities are at a total loss with how to provide for them. The twist of course is that they are extraterrestrials, a race whose rusting fleet of spacecraft hover over Joburg, sucking energy directly from the grid. The film is edited in the form of a roughly cut TV news report, with exaggerated awareness and emphasis on human rights and dignity. The aliens are de facto criminals, but the local TV news pixilate their tentacled faces, when shown in close-up. When bemused policemen are interviewed, they struggle with their frustrations, but are held in check by their sensitivity training. It’s clear that they are failing to cope, and it's a clever reminder of the social chaos which hamstrung the National government in the last years before the handover to the ANC. It was an anxious time which Blomkamp and his family endured before immigrating to Canada.

Blomkamp is a 3D animator by trade, and was graphics trained here in Vancouver. The project was completed in his free time, scheduling around his day job. After shooting in S.A. he used LightWave and Photoshop to manipulate the video and boujou4 motion control software to marry the elements. My immediate response to a viewing on Google Video was “Wow, where can I find a sharper copy of this?” In fact Neill deliberately degraded the CGI shots to match the older SABC VHS quality news clips he edited in. In the doing, he greatly reduced production costs.

Some of the best onscreen flourishes include a scene in which an alien in a power-suit lifts and throws a Casspir armoured personnel carrier at a team of cops who are garbed in futuristic urban combat gear. My favorite images occur in the opening sequence. We see alien vessels hovering over the city, with their thick, energy sucking ganglia heavily draped over the power lines and even down into generating plant cooling towers. The pop-culture fan sites have decided for themselves that these hovering ships and even the video’s basic dramatic premise, are referenced by the old American TV series Alien Nation. That’s a gratuitous insult to Neill, I’m sure. The spacecraft are an obvious borrowing from the 1996 movie Independence Day (ID4), and everything else is tres, tres, RSA. In fact, if you watch carefully you will note that ALIVE IN JOBURG is actually set in the recent past – 1990, and not in the near future. That categorizes the film as an allegorical tale, in the same vein as Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM.

Blomkamp’s short film is in the public domain and has earned almost 200,000 free downloads from the three sites I monitor. That’s fantastic. It goes a long way toward explaining why a guy who has never done a feature, is now regarded as a “hot” new director.

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January 25 - UPDATE: This morning I visited the new business location of The Embassy Visual Effects, in Vancouver, and spoke to its President, Winston Helgason. Blomkamp left a couple of months ago and is presently working in New Zealand. I was assured that the HALO project was definately "gone", but at the same time I was not told what Blomkamp is contributing as a member of the Jackson stable.