The News Review:

- Movies: ‘Blood Diamond’
- Movie rings true for missionary child who was there
- Movies: Chasing after diamonds against a sanctimonious backdrop of…

Movies: ‘Blood Diamond’
Washington Post – Dec 5, 2006
correction {margin-top:8px;padding-top:10px;margin-bottom:8px;border-bottom:1px solid #CCCCCC;padding-bottom:10px;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:11px;color:#333333;}. The film, set in 1990s Sierra Leone and also starring Jennifer Connelly, was directed and produced by Ed Zwick. Zwick was online Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006 at noon ET to discuss the movie as well as his career in Hollywood. His previous directing credits include "Glory," "Legends of the Fall," "Courage Under Fire," and "The Last Samurai. " He also has served as producer on such films as "Shakespeare in Love" and "Traffic…
"_______________________Manassas, Va. : Thank you for bringing to light the atrocities that diamonds could let humans perpetrate on innocent humans. Is it true that even though this movie is about 1990′s Sierra Leone, not a single scene was shot in that country?Sierra Leone is a very safe and stable country now with a lot of tourist potential that the making of this movie would have added to. Ed Zwick: If you watch the film you will see that we did indeed shoot some scenes in SL. And the film ends with the words, "Sierra Leone is at peace. " I, too, have only the best wishes for the future of the country.

Movie rings true for missionary child who was there
Pittsburgh Post Gazette – Dec 8, 2006
Click photo for larger image. Seeing the movie this week brought back memories of going with my parents to visit the head office of a newly opened diamond mining operation 10 miles from our United Brethren in Christ mission. This was in the Kono tribal country in British-governed Sierra Leone — what six decades later would be the cauldron of the war portrayed in “Blood Diamond. Five years before, in 1930, a native African digging a latrine had come across a brilliant, shining stone. Soon enough, the British government realized the possibility of a major field of top-quality gem diamonds. The De Beers syndicate of South Africa, which held a worldwide monopoly on diamonds, then formed a subsidiary for Sierra Leone and began major explorations, and then operations. In those early days, everything was open…
But the miners showed up wearing soccer boots, and my father soon stepped in to stop the match when it became apparent how the boots were cutting up our schoolboys’ bare feet. At the time of my childhood visits, the British engineers said they had no idea of the origin of the diamonds, except that they were alluvial and not from volcanic “pipes,” as in the Kimberly fields in South Africa. That is, the Sierra Leone diamonds were found in the skin of the earth, in streams or only a few feet underground, indicating that they had been washed there from somewhere else. When I returned for a visit in 1962, for the first anniversary of Sierra Leone’s independence from Britain, the word was that the source still had not been discovered. But the natives contended that the British knew the diamonds came from an elevation called “Monkey Hill,” presumably for a colony of primates there. The Konos had figured that out from the lay of the land of the diamond-bearing streams. And sure enough, by the time I returned for another visit in 1991, the British had admitted discovering a long horizontal pipe stretching underground for miles from Monkey Hill.

Movies: Chasing after diamonds against a sanctimonious backdrop of…
International Herald Tribune – Dec 8, 2006
Zwick likes to make epic-size movies about men of anguish and conscience who, whether they wear Civil War blue (“Glory”) or a Meiji kimono (“The Last Samurai”), invariably land on the side of the angels. Danny is initially on the side of the devils, and when we first meet him in 1999 he is trying to cross the border of a perilously unstable Sierra Leone with a stash of diamonds tucked into some goats. Busted by a patrol from Sierra Leone, he lands in jail, where he soon hears of a precious pink diamond recently unearthed by a fisherman turned unwilling miner, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou). The chase is on, and on. Written by Charles Leavitt, “Blood Diamond” more or less plays like an exotically situated action flick as each man races toward his respective goal. Theirs might be a match made in movie-genre heaven if the filmmakers didn’t insist on wagging their fingers in our faces and delivering dire statistics by the ream, the intimations of Antwerp intrigue and an American journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), whose preferred interview method involves shimmying up to her subject like a pole dancer.