A tale of a dystopian future where an unknown alien group have colonised the earth and humans struggle to fight back.

We do things backwards and thought it would be a great time to feature Neill Blomkamp’s first of three independent shorts from Oats Studios – We’ve already featured Zygote and Firebase on Film Shortage earlier this year. Rakka stars a handful of well known actors including Academy Award winner Sigourney Weaver and Carly Pope. Blomkamp’s (District 9, Chappie) Oats Studios needs little introduction at this point, but we urge you to check out the series of short films from the proclaimed director, introducing a new form sourced entertainment. We love it!

The original idea was to make make a science fiction piece that was about an occupying force in a foreign country, and it kind of grew around that. I always wanted to do a science fiction invasion piece that had direct parallels with an occupying force in a country, like the Germans in France, or Americans in Iraq. There’s these levels of armed troops that are walking through neighborhoods, and well-built buildings, and local politicians have been turned or manipulated. There is a lot of stuff in there that I felt was really interesting, and to look at it from a different point of view is really cool. That’s where the seed was from.

The main idea that I like is that [the alien creatures] have this nanotech ferrofluid that changes shape. The aliens would have essentially come to earth in a lake. It forms whenever they need, and when they arrive at Earth, it probably split up into several pieces, with the different ships that formed out of it going to different continents and building the towers that they live in. They breathe a different atmosphere. If you look at the creature itself, it has this black hood on that also runs down the bridge of its nose. It’s almost like a gas mask, but hooked directly into their nostrils. It just does whatever they need it to: it processes Earth’s air into a mixture that they can breathe, it forms weapons, it forms the structures that they live in, it forms their vehicles. I just like the idea that [the fluid’s] always active, and it’s intelligent.

The aliens that we see in this piece, which we have dubbed the “Klum” aliens (rhymes with ‘plume’), are actually a sort of genetically cloned drone. They’re not entirely sentient, and they’re sent out by a far more intelligent species who we haven’t really seen yet.

Read the full interview on The Verge.