The Eleven Films About Refugees You Need To See
They're less depressing than the real thing.
District 9 (2009)
Like Children of Men, this is science fiction with a clearer vision of our society than most docos. There’s plenty of real life in its grim, satirical depiction of a South African detention camp/shantytown, where thousands of alien refugees are kept in squalid conditions by the government. The “prawns” are stereotyped as lowlives, criminals, even terrorists, and are regularly beaten and killed by police.
When a brutal forced eviction goes awry, a government bureaucrat is genetically altered to become more like the aliens, and befriends one of the refugees, who’s working on a plan to escape Earth and return to their homeland, leading to a showdown with militarised private security forces. The payoff is a good old-fashioned shoot-em-up, but if you don’t shudder once or twice along the way at the portrayal of xenophobia and ethnic displacement, you haven’t been reading the news.