Alien Refugees
Just saw an interesting short film about an alien spaceship that breaks down, leaving its inhabitants refugees in South Africa. This was embedded in a review trashing the feature length adaptation, but the short is great. It’s an interesting think piece on what might happen if aliens land here and turn out not to be conquerers but down on their luck. It opens with a Halo type fight scene, but the aliens basically run out of gas and end up huddled around trash can fires in hoodies.
Alive in Joburg is a clever composite of fake news footage and man-on-the-street interviews that manages to inspire a startling pathos for the downtrodden aliens. They appear huddled around garbage-can fires in hooded sweatshirts and wrapped with blankets. Their faces are blurred out, as if they were criminals on an episode of COPS, and we see only the ends of tentacles dangling from their chins. As they grunt plaintively in an alien language, subtitles appear across the bottom of the screen: “give us electricity … the place here we cannot adapt … give us running water that we may hydrate … we are stuck.” (Slate)
I’m not sure what it means as social commentary, and apparently the feature length movie missed that mark, but it’s an interesting thought.
Thanks for this post! Very interesting to see the short film.
I thought the full length movie was wicked cool :-) But maybe I’m slightly nostalgic….upon hearing those Afrikaans accents!
It’s true though that the movie didn’t really delve deep to tackle the roots of the social commentary but it at least raises some awareness of the xenophobia related unrest over the last few years in SA. *sigh*…MNU huh!