According to the website boxofficemojo.com, the movie District 9 has already brought in about $184 million worldwide so far.

Film poster.

That has to mean that hundreds of thousands of people have seen this film, which depicts a world in which a species of aliens informally known as ‘prawns’ has made its way to Earth (above Johannesburg, specifically), only to be segregated into a slum at the edge of the city.

The movie is exhilarating, thoughtful, and CGI-beautiful in that singular Peter Jackson kind of way. Sharito Copley, who plays the semi-hero, Wikus, delivers a performance that covers the range of humanity (and just about every deadly sin), including arrogance and wrath, but also empathy and the struggle for life itself.

District 9 is well worth both your eight bucks and your hour and a half, but that’s not what I’m writing about. What I’m most curious about are those hundreds of thousands of people who have seen this movie. I wonder, do they realize just how real this movie is?

In the film District 9 is the area in which the aliens are kept. It is surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. The aliens live in makeshift shacks built out of materials like loose, mismatched timber, cardboard, and lots of corrugated steel. There are no indoor toilets or showers, and the police are scared to go in; when they do they come in with armor and automatic weapons. Murders are an everyday occurrence, yet investigations are as rare as visits by the ice cream man. Alien children run barefoot on trash-laden streets, watched by no one, forced to essentially raise themselves. Cows are killed outdoors without regulation or sanitation, and the aliens line up to haul legs and shanks on their shoulders as the flies make chase. The aliens are untouchables. To them, hope is a four-letter word.

Langa township in Cape Town.

I’ve spent nearly a year of my life in South Africa, first in Johannesburg to meet my ex-fiance’s family, and then close to nine months in Cape Town working at a home for young men from the streets and townships. I can tell you, because I’ve been to the real-life District 9: this is no metaphor. It is not symbolic. It is not a social commentary or a social satire or a social anything else. This is the reality of how the vast majority of black people in South Africa still live.

And I wonder, do the people watching this movie know this?

Before I went to South Africa for the first time, I didn’t know this. I thought that I had grown up, at times, in poverty myself. We had no hot water, no phone, were evicted from homes, and got by using food stamps. That counts, right? Well, I thought it did until I went to South Africa. But I was always fed. I was always clean. I was always safe. The townships of South Africa taught me what real poverty is all about. That’s when I learned that human beings, right now, today, are being treated like the aliens in a Peter Jackson-produced movie.

All of this is relatively neither-here-nor-there to the film itself. It is a good movie that you should see, but see it with the knowledge that the prawn township is not a commentary on Apartheid South Africa; it is a direct reflection of the New South Africa. It is the South Africa you would see if you got on a plane today.The oppression is no longer government sanctioned, as it is in the film, but the living conditions are spot on.

I volunteered in Cape Town at a place called Beth Uriel. If you go see District 9, I suggest that afterward you check out their website, and consider making a matching $8 donation to their cause. The web of oppression cast by extreme poverty is essentially inescapable for most people in South Africa. It takes places like Beth Uriel–which provides a safe bed at night, three meals, and a good education to some of those in need–to help the good people there live like, what is, by our standards, humans.

Here’s a short clip of some of the Beth Uriel guys:

District 9 is showing @ The Naro everyday until Thursday.