In the organizer's words:

DISTRICT 9 (OmU)

Lecture and film series DAS "FREMDE" IM FILM in cooperation with the Institute for European Art History at Heidelberg University

Date: 07.01.2026, 18:00 hrs
Lecture: Martin Ramm - media scientist and film journalist, Kiel

Cat Food & Body Horror in District 9: Logics of Strangeness in Science Fiction Cinema

USA/NZ/CA/ZA 2009 | Director: Neill Blomkamp | 112 min.

For two decades, aliens stranded above Johannesburg have been living as "asylum seekers" in the isolated ghetto "District 9". But an increasingly hostile society wants to get rid of them and commissions a private company to relocate them outside the city gates. However, the corporation is more interested in the aliens' sophisticated weapons than in their well-being. In the form of a "mockumentary", this grim science fiction drama sketches a degenerated society and combines its dystopian message with an impressive "look" that aims for realism in a captivating way. (filmdienst.de)

The film District 9 is characterized by contradictions: On the surface, it critically examines apartheid, forced relocation and corporate rule. But in the subtext, antinomic tensions are revealed: The "alien" aliens are marked by disgust aesthetics and swarm semantics, and the protagonist's hero's journey, which at first glance seems conventional, allows for ambivalent readings. The lecture explores these phenomena - against the backdrop of a tradition of alien representation in science fiction films that has always been torn apart.

Price information:

regular: € 10,- | reduced: € 8,- (Reduction: Guild pass, students, pupils, senior citizens over 65, severely disabled pass, social pass)