Monthly Archives: March 2011

Puffin Short Story Awards

Here is something for all you keen writers. The Puffin Short Story Awards 2011 is underway  so why don’t you add your entry? There is no set theme for the competition so you can let your imagination go wild. There is an intermediate and a senior section so students in Years 7-11 can enter. The competition closes on June 3. More details can be found here.

Post-apartheid at the movies

Here is an extract from a Mail Guardian Online article that discusses three films with a South African setting – District 9, Invictus and Skin.

Poor aliens. They trek halfway across the galaxy, run out of petrol and end up living off cat food in, of all places, 1980s Johannesburg. Then they get the kind of reception that asylum seekers who don’t speak the language have come to expect.

This is the improbable premise of the surprise sci-fi hit of the year. District 9 shot to the top of the United States box office in its opening weekend and earned the kind of reviews that eluded George Lucas — even the first time around. Its modest credentials include a 29-year-old debutant director, a budget of just $30-million and a cast of unknowns.

But District 9 also boasts two points of instant recognition. Its producer is Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings films and King Kong. Its setting is apartheid-style South Africa, a time and place that seems both close and yet distant, a paradox that filmmakers are now finding irresistible. Improbably, the traumas suffered as a result of South Africa’s white-minority rule have now become one of cinema’s most fertile territories.

The warped society apartheid created will be examined in a rugby film about Nelson Mandela, the story of photographers capturing township violence and the startling real-life account of a black girl born to white parents. As a result, Hollywood stars — including Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood, Ryan Phillippe, John Malkovich and Sophie Okonedo — have been crowding the arrivals halls at South Africa’s airports. The gold rush comes 15 years after Africa’s most powerful nation held its first democratic election and on the eve of the biggest sporting event in its history.

Of all the new releases, District 9 wears its politics most lightly, making no mention of apartheid or its legacy in today’s impoverished black townships. But the allegorical overtones are inescapable in the plot about aliens who, their spaceship stranded above Johannesburg, have to endure a daily routine of unemployment, gangsterism and xenophobia in a squalid shantytown. The Prawns — as they are known in derogatory slang because of their vaguely crustacean appearance — spend their hopeless days brawling and getting high on pet food.

District 9’s director, Neill Blomkamp, lives in Canada, but was born and grew up in Johannesburg. “In my opinion the film doesn’t exist without Jo’burg,” he told journalists last month. “It’s not like I had a story and then I was trying to pick a city. It’s totally the other way around. I actually think Johannesburg represents the future. What I think the world is going to become looks like Johannesburg.”

District 9 has been lauded for combining an allegory of apartheid with awesome special effects, but it is perhaps the real-life locations that will linger in the audience’s minds. Blomkamp admitted that this authenticity came at a price. He was terrified daily that his convoy of vehicles would be a target for carjackers as it travelled to work in Soweto.

One night the fears were realised when his driver had a 9mm gun put to his head and his car stolen. “The people are warm, but the environment is so caustic and unbelievably disgusting to be in. Every single thing is difficult. There’s broken glass everywhere, there’s rusted barbed wire everywhere, the level of pollution is insane. And then, in that environment, you’re trying to be creative as well. But, of course, that gave birth to the creativity, so it kind of goes both ways.”

District 9 is not the most alluring advert for South Africa as a place for filmmakers to ply their trade. But the reality is somewhat different. The country boasts superb locations, world-class studios and technical crews at relatively low costs. It has a compelling history that the rest of the world is starting to rediscover. As the teacher Irwin observes in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, there is no period so remote as the recent past.

Read the rest here.

D9 reviews to add to your background reading

Here is a review of District 9 from Variety:

Upon the ashes of his aborted “Halo” vidgame adaptation, producer Peter Jackson has erected “District 9,” an enjoyably disgusting sci-fier set in and around a rubble-strewn war zone where extraterrestrial refugees have taken up indefinite residence. Better conceived and executed than one might expect from a low-budget rebound project, this grossly engrossing speculative fiction bears Jackson’s blood-splattered fingerprints but also heralds first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp as a nimble talent to watch. A viral campaign reminiscent of the more gimmicky “Cloverfield” should draw hefty hordes initially, but positive notices and buzz will be required to sustain a B.O. invasion.

Shot and set in Blomkamp’s native South Africa, “District 9” imagines a present-day scenario in which humans and aliens are forced into an uneasy co-existence and, predictably, bring out the violent worst in each other. As scripted by Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell, the result reps a remarkably cohesive hybrid of creature feature and satirical mockumentary that elaborates on the helmer’s 2005 short “Alive in Jo’burg,” borrows plot points from 1988’s “Alien Nation” and takes its emotional cues from “E.T.”

The film’s faux-verite visual style, however, is very much a thing of the present, blending handheld HD camerawork with ersatz news coverage (complete with CNN-style text scrolls) and talking heads, plus actual archival footage from local news agencies, so as to suggest an urgent dispatch from the front lines of an interspecies war.

The introductory 15 minutes are swiftly paced, making modest demands on the viewer to keep up with the jiggly aesthetic and the particulars of the premise: Twenty years ago, an enormous spaceship came to rest over Johannesburg, now a sun-scorched urban wasteland. Since then, the ship’s inhabitants, referred to as “prawns” — four-legged insectoid beings that walk upright, secrete black goo and speak in subtitled grunts and gurgles — have been moved into the titular ghetto and placed under the control of Multi-National United, a private corporation bent on cracking the secrets of the aliens’ ultra-powerful weapons.

Read the rest here.

This one is from Guttersnipe:

The story goes like this: District 9’s director, Neill Blomkamp, was set to direct the film adaptation of Halo. Halo’s producer, Peter Jackson, had faith in the fledgling director, whose resume thus far was a string of commercials and shorts based on the Halo universe. But when it came time to get to work, the studio ran out of money (and, some say, faith in the untested young director).

 

And then Blomkamp, a Vancouverite who’d spent his childhood in apartheid-torn South Africa, gave Jackson the script for District 9: A grandiose, Johannesburg-set, film expanding on his own short, Alive in Joburg, about aliens coming to earth and being forced into slums by a frightened populace. Jackson said yes, signed on to produce, and set about creating the aliens in his New Zealand Weta workshop (Jackson’s Industrial Light & Magic; the birthplace of many a Lord of the Ring orc and Gollum).

 

The result could have been catastrophic: an unknown director helming a huge genre film – with a long and storied blockbuster tradition – that doesn’t have a bankable star nor a Washington, DC or NYC backdrop. Nor do the aliens come ready to war. Nor are there muscle-bound heroes.

 

Instead, at its heart, District 9 is a grand apartheid allusion – and for those of us only semi-familiar with South Africa’s murky past, the feeling of disconnect from the subject matter and lack of a sense of place (I had never seen the Johannesburg skyline before, never mind spent two hours keening my ear towards that accent) only further works to help hit the points home: Why does the human race shrink from or rail at difference? What does it mean to be “alien?” Are we not alike, deep down? Is cruelty easier to perpetrate (and stomach) if the victim does not look like us, speak like us or live like we do?

Read the rest here.