District 9 is based on 'Alive in Joburg' (video), a short film directed by Neill Blomkamp, Sharlto Copley, Simon Hansen and Shanon Worley. The title is influenced by the real-life District 6 in Cape Town. Copley also portrayed one of the interviewed policemen. The short film is about aliens landing in South Africa and becoming confined to a specific area and forced to work.
In the movie, aliens made first contact with Earth twenty-eight years prior to the beginning of the film, after which humanity waited for either a hostile attack or for giant advances in technology, though neither came.
Instead, the aliens that arrived were refugees, the last survivors of their home world. The creatures were set up in a makeshift home in South Africa's District 9 as the world's nations argued over what to do with them. Patience over the alien situation ran out and control over them was contracted out to Multi-National United (MNU), a private company uninterested in the aliens' welfare. MNU stands to receive tremendous profits if they can make the aliens' advanced weaponry work. |
