Neill Blomkamp is back at doing what he does best: being weird and creating awesome alien sci-fi stories. His new 20-minute short film, Rakka, contains everything you love from District 9.
Now streaming on Steam and YouTube, Rakka is the first short film from Oats Studios Volume 1, a collection of short sci-fi films. Unsurprisingly, it depicts the aftermath of an alien invasion, not too different from Blomkamp’s breakout film, District 9. The 3-part short also features Sigourney Weaver as the leader of a resistance movement. “Bleak harrowing and unrelenting, the humans we meet must find enough courage to go on fighting,” the description reads.
The first short features South African actors, monsters, aliens and all sorts of strange science fiction imagery. It’s beautifully shot and has high production value.
Blomkamp is excited about the project and promises a lot more stories like this:
“I’m definitely interested in going down the road of serious, dead straight filmmaking. It’s definitely a big part of what’s interesting me at the moment. I think Oats, in general, is a place where I have the ability to go from comedy to fantasy to science fiction to horror. I can basically just skip around wherever I want to go. The creative forward momentum right now is, I want to make films that are serious. I’ve never really done that before – everything I’ve done has always been a little bit askew, a little bit weird. When I was in film school, I wanted to make films that were dead serious – obviously, films like Alien made me want to become a filmmaker, and if you look at war films like Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down, those films are also incredibly appealing to me.”
Neels Malan Ryan Layton