Blood Diamond:
Blood Diamond is a 2006 American political war thriller film directed and co-produced by Edward Zwick and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou. The title refers to blood diamonds, which are diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance conflicts, and thereby profit warlords and diamond companies around the world. Set during the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1991–2002, the film depicts a country torn apart by the struggle between government loyalists and insurgent forces. It also portrays many of the atrocities of that war, including the rebels’ amputation of civilians’ hands to discourage them from voting in upcoming elections.
Plot:
In 1999, Sierra Leone is ravaged by civil war. The Revolutionary United Front terrorizes the countryside and enslaves many locals to harvest diamonds, which fund their increasingly successful war effort. Solomon Vandy, a Mende fisherman from Shenge, is separated from his family and assigned to a workforce overseen by Captain Poison, a ruthless warlord. While mining a river, Vandy discovers an enormous pink diamond. Captain Poison tries to take the stone, but the area is suddenly raided by government troops. Vandy buries the stone before being captured.
Vandy and Poison are incarcerated in Freetown along with Danny Archer, a white Rhodesian gunrunner and Border War veteran jailed for trying to smuggle diamonds into Liberia. The diamonds were intended for Rudolph van de Kaap, a corrupt South African mining executive.
Hearing of the pink diamond in prison, Archer arranges for himself and Vandy to be freed. He travels to Cape Town to meet his employer:
Colonel Coetzee, an Afrikaner formerly with the apartheid-era South African Defence Force (whom Archer also served under in the 32 Battalion), who now commands a private military company.
