The names of the factions who were at war were the New Territories and the Federated Republics.
This feature film was shot over seven weeks from late October 1995 to early December
1995 in and around inner city Melbourne in Victoria, Australia and the desolate salt pan around
Woomera in northern South Australia, Australia.
The film's director, John Tatoulis, said of this movie in an interview published on 20th May 1997 in 'Signis': "In 'Zone 39', I was exploring a couple of things. One was the way in which a person deals with grief, the loss of a loved on. I truly believe that someone doesn't die until we stop thinking about that person. I think once we forget that person, once that person ceases to live in our memories, then that person is truly dead. Often it takes a long time for that person to truly die in people's hearts. I wanted to explore this theme in an environment that I think we're heading towards, one of being like a society that is particularly unfriendly to the individual and particularly isolates the individual and controls that individual".
The film features the remote South Australian desert region of Woomera,
where the summer temperature regularly soars into the 40s and the
landscape, with its white salt flats and rocky desert floor, provides an alien
backdrop for this future-world story.
For the urban scenes in this film, the producers stayed close to home, in the
city of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Without the spectacular assistance that nature
provided at Woomera in South Australia, the producers had to create the dirty, crowded,
claustrophobic and grungy atmosphere of the future-world metropolis.