Blood Diamond

It was Naomi and my wedding anniversary on Monday - it has been thirteen years. We thought that we would celebrate our special day by going to a movie, you know, something romantic... something like BLOOD DIAMOND??????

Well, it was not exactly romantic, but it was the only movie worth seeing at the moment so even though we knew we were in for a heavy time we thought we would go see it anyway...

If you have not seen it, Blood Diamond is based in Sierra Leone during the civil war (it is officially at peace at the moment), following the story of a fisherman who is captured by the RUF and forced to work in a diamond mine where he finds and hides a massive pink diamond, the mine is attacked by the government troops, the fisherman "Solomon" is captured by the troops and put into prison where he meets "Archer" a diamond smuggler who wants to get his hands on the diamond and sell it to a UK diamond company (ripping off Solomon in the process). Meanwhile Solomons son Dia is captured by the RUF and trained to be a child soldier.

I won't go into any more details about the movie, however I have a few reflections to make...

We recently made the acquaintance of a family of 11 from Sierra Leone who just came to Australia (we were asked to help find them housing and clothing and other such things as they came out with next to nothing). The stories told by this family are very similar to what happened in the movie, however the real horrors of rape that they had to endure were not depicted in the movie (thankfully).

From what I understand the SL family were quite happy that the movie was released as it shows the plight of the people and raises awareness of what is going on in war torn countries. And I agree with that, a person who is sensitive to what is going on in the world will be shocked into a sense of urgency and desperation... unfortunately there is no real hope presented in the movie, even though it does have a happy Hollywood ending (I guess that is where the quote by Dave Andrews comes in - we can see change).

The most disturbing thing for me in this movie however was the audiences attitude. We had a young couple in the cinema with us who chatted through the whole movie, making excited noises at signs of violence, and walked out of the cinema as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile Naomi and I were shattered by the harsh reality of the movie. Is there really any advantage in making a movie like this if it is only viewed as entertainment? To see the horror that real life human beings have had to go through viewed as nothing more than another Lethal Weapon movie or something like that is really disturbing...

Anyway, this movie brings home the reality of many of the refugees that we work with here in Noble Park and Springvale, it explains the tendency of these refugees to hide away and keep to themselves, not participating in the wider community, not interacting and not learning English. It also highlights the ignorance of people who complain about immigrants entering Australia and behaving this way.

At one of the houses that we stayed in when we first moved into Noble Park, there was a young African child living there, this child would often have nightmares, waking and screaming in absolute terror. What had this child seen? How can we ignore the evil that is going on in the world, or reduce it to entertainment....

anyway that's about enough from me....

Peter