Blood Diamond
Blood Diamond Controversy: Amputee Scandal
"When we were there we were very moved by many people's circumstances," said Paula Weinstein. "Frankly, we have kept private our giving, whether it was in South Africa or Mozambique. What happened is that the cast and crew came together, all of us, and donated money privately, which we are in the process of giving out to many, many different organizations. Frankly, we never wanted this to be public. It's not something that's important except to the people we met with and hopefully that we helped, and it certainly changed our lives."
The film chronicles atrocities committed by African governments and military in forcing their people to mine for diamonds. The producers only hope that the film informs people on how they can avoid supporting such industries, and suggest that such negative press may be related to bitterness in the industry.
"One of the things that's gratifying has been that actually there was a very marked change on the part of the diamond industry in its attitude to this film," said Marshall Herskovitz. It started out being very antagonistic, and the implied threat that they were somehow going to go against us and bad-mouth what our efforts were, and in midstream they made a real change in their strategy and their attitude toward this and I think they were well advised to do so. And if you look at what they said in the past three months, it's been entirely positive. It's positive about the film and it's been positive in terms of saying that they accept their responsibilities to make sure that The Kimberly Process is upheld, and they accept the fact that they have not always done the best job of doing that, an I think they're wise to do that, and I think it serves everyone to do that, because I think they're going to be held to it. I think they should be and they will."
Herskovitz hopes that the positives outshine some of the negative press. "You know, these news items were clearly planted, if you could say it that way, and I think we were encouraged by the fact that they really didn't get a lot of traction, because there just wasn't anything in them. So I'm not sure it's really worth commenting any further because it was just kind of silliness."
Blood Diamond opens to theatres on December 8th.
For the trailers, movie stills, posters, full synopsis and more movie info,
go to the Blood
Diamond Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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