New film starring DiCaprio rattles diamond industry"The Blood Diamond," a film in production starring
Leonardo DiCaprio, could hurt diamond sales and the livelihoods of people in Africa, industry leaders warned on Tuesday. The Warner Brothers film being shot in Africa shows how "conflict diamonds" financed bloody civil wars. DiCaprio portrays a mercenary jailed for smuggling in Sierra Leone, where a civil war lasting until 2002 killed 50,000 people.
Industry officials attending the opening of the World Diamond Congress said the situation with conflict diamonds had dramatically improved in recent years and expressed concern that the movie would not reflect this.
"The problem of conflict diamonds is practically over," Shmuel Schnitzer, outgoing president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses (WFDB), told Reuters at the conference in Tel Aviv, among the world's top diamond cutting and trading centers.
"To show a film that will lead the public to think the situation is still the same is an injustice to our industry which has done so much," he said.
In a press release issued in February, Warner Bros. Pictures said The Blood Diamond, starring DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly had started production in South Africa and Mozambique.
It did not say when it will be released and company officials could not be reached for comment. The unofficial IMDb movie database has the U.S. release date as January, 2007.
