In District 9 ((2009) South African director Neill Blomkamp gives a new twist to the idea of alterity and its relation to the concept of exception: in 1982 an alien spaceship appears over Johannesburg. When the authorities discover a severely malnourished alien population inside, they decide to take them to an internment camp on the outskirts of the capital. The camp, a genuine paradeisos enclosed by concrete walls and guarded by a private police force, quickly becomes a ghetto where crime and violence proliferate. Of course, tensions between humans and aliens are not long in coming.

The brilliance of District 9 ’s premise lies in taking the problems of racial segregation that have plagued South Africa since the arrival of the European settlers into the realm of science fiction. The very name of the film is based on District 6 in Cape Town, a residential inner-city neighborhood whose inhabitants, approximately 60,000, were forcibly displaced during the Apartheid era. In the world depicted in District 9 , alterity is no longer a matter of race or status; the new “blacks” are the most radical other imaginable, beings from another planet. Moreover, their status as intergalactic refugees makes the “prawns”—as the aliens are called because of their resemblance to these animals—a population without a defined civil status or, in other words, in a constant state of exception.

On the other hand, the film also addresses the dynamic between identity and alterity. Wikus van de Merwe, the officer in charge of moving the alien population of District 9 to a new internment camp, comes into contact with a piece of alien technology that genetically modifies him, gradually turning him into one of the “prawns.” In a zone of indistinction between human and alien, ever closer to becoming an other, District 9 shows us the hunt of which Wikus is a victim and his misadventures to reach the alien ship where the technology supposedly exists to return him from alterity to identity.