Anna Daniels
Neill Blomkamp‘s experimental short film initiative Oats Studios was launched in 2017 as sort of a creative breeding ground for the Chappie director as well as a platform to boost up-and-coming filmmakers. A few of Blomkamp’s own short films garnered a bit of buzz — enough for one project to be crowdfunded for a feature film remake, and then cancelled — but with the newest Oats Studios film, the director steps back to let some new talent shine. Oats Studios has released Migrants, a short film by Paul Chadeisson as part of “a new playlist that will become a curated collection of our favorite short films from our favorite artists.” Watch the Migrants short film below.
Migrants Short Film
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2dGWH90aew?feature=oembed&w=740&h=416]
If you love docking sequences set to cool, pensive narration, then Migrants is the short film for you. Not much happens in this short, which is set in a distant future in which Mars has been terraformed. In the three-minute short, a blue ship with the name Asimov painted on it (in what is likely a nod to Isaac Asimov, the godfather of science-fiction), docks onto a space station floating above a terraformed Mars, while an unseen man narrates: “We are the cleaners. As were our fathers. We purify the world. One day our children will breathe.”
Here’s the brief synopsis of the short film:
Humanity started the process of terraforming Mars many years ago. We follow the thoughts and prayers of one of the “cleaners” who works on this titanic project.
It’s a slow, simple short with shades of Ad Astra and Gravity, especially in the latter’s crisp, cutting-edge VFX, which is incredibly impressive for a short film. But Oats Studios likely has a lot of resources at their disposal, thanks to Blomkamp’s standing as an accomplished sci-fi filmmaker thanks to his acclaimed debut film District 9. That standing has fallen somewhat with subsequent films like Elysium and Chappie, and failed projects like the HALO film and his recent Firebase misfire.
But Blomkamp seems to be thriving in the short film community, back where he got his start — his short film Alive in Joburg would eventually become District 9. And while Blomkamp hasn’t yet created his own hit short that would fulfill Oats Studios’ mission statement “gauge the community for interest as to which of them are viable for expansion into feature films,” perhaps the films from the new “curated collection” that Migrants is a part of could succeed.
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