10 Films That Creepily Predicted 2016’s Biggest Moments

The Calais Jungle, ‘home’ to thousands of refugees, has been a sad fact of life in some form or another since around the early noughties. But despite repeated attempts by French authorities to close down the shanty town, it wasn’t until October 2016 that the camp was declared officially cleared when its residents were evacuated and redistributed to refugee reception centres across France.

Cast your mind back to 2009 and Neill Blomkamp’s critically acclaimed sci-fi District 9. A spaceship carrying a million sick aliens appears over Johannesburg and the South African government oh so kindly takes them in, confining them to a squalid camp on the outskirts of the city.

Years later, tensions between natives and alien refugees, not so affectionately termed ‘prawns’ by locals, have reached boiling point and the government decides it’s time to relocate the growing alien populace to a new internment camp. Trade District 9’s prawns for today’s refugees and you’ve got a pretty creepy foreshadowing of the events that took place at the Calais Jungle this year.

Admittedly the movie was inspired by events in South Africa’s tumultuous apartheid era when a district of Cape Town was declared a whites-only area and tens of thousands of black residents were forcibly removed and displaced to Cape Flats, a region referred to as the ‘apartheid’s dumping ground’.

Regardless of its inspiration, it’s still an insightful look at how those deemed as lesser – be it the Calais Jungle’s refugees or black South Africans during the apartheid – are treated by society.