Hounsou Pours Passion Into 'Blood Diamond'

Already tapped earlier this week by the National Board of Motion Pictures as Best Supporting Actor, it's a good sign that this year's awards season is going to be big for "Blood Diamond" star Djimon Hounsou.

But even in the unlikely event that no more acting honors come his way, Hounsou will still emerge from the project a winner. As a native of Benin, South Africa, Hounsou said that this is his most emotionally charged, personal role to date -- and his biggest reward will be the awareness the film generates about the carnage surrounding the "conflict diamond" trade during the civil war in Sierra Leone in late 1990s.

"Being from Africa, I feel a lot of people still need to be educated about Africa because the only thing they know about it is from the National Geographic Channel," Hounsou told me in a recent @ The Movies interview. "It's one of the most powerful stories about Africa, and I wanted to be a part of it."

In "Blood Diamond," Leonard DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, an ex-mercenary from Zimbabwe who learns that a Mende fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), has discovered a rare pink diamond while he was forced to mine for the gems under the capture of rebel soldiers.

Archer, who carved out a living trading diamonds for arms, knows the gem is his ticket out of Sierra Leone and away from the bloodshed of which he's willingly become a part. But to Vandy, the price of the diamond is far greater: It's his only means to save his wife and daughter from a refugee camp and his son from a cruel fate as a child soldier.

Directed by Edward Zwick, the movie also stars Jennifer Connolly as an American journalist looking to blow the lid off the conflict diamond trade and its ties to the diamond industry. "Blood Diamond" opens Friday in theaters nationwide.

At the heart of "Blood Diamond" are "conflict diamonds" -- precious gems smuggled out of countries at war -- and the millions of dollars they generate to buy the arms that fuel the bloodshed. But the cost is much higher for the everyday people caught up in the chaos, Hounsou said.

""It's not just about diamonds. There are several issues around it -- there's the issue of child soldiers, the displacement of millions of people throughout the continent, especially affecting the neighboring countries of those places affected," Hounsou explained. "There are so many underlying issues."

The most horrifying issue for Hounsou's character in "Blood Diamond" is the kidnapping of Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), Solomon's young son who has dreams of a becoming a doctor. But that future is threatened when rebel soldiers begin to brainwash him into becoming a gun-toting child soldier -- the sort of adolescent killers that sadly exist in Africa to this day.

"In the Democratic Republic of Congo it is still happening," Hounsou said. "It's chaotic over there right now. There are 200,000 child soldiers that we can account for, and there are so many others that we cannot."

The sad thing is, Hounsou said, the recovery of these children doesn't automatically solve the problem.

"What happens with those kids when peace comes to the country? They can't go back to the village where they came from, where they wrecked, killed and butchered," Hounsou explained. "We have to reeducate them and reintegrate them into society so they don't become the dictators of tomorrow."

An Active Participant
Hounsou's passion to educate the public about the plights of Africa extends far beyond the big screen. For his part, he's dedicated himself to participating in the causes of such human rights organizations as Amnesty International, OxFam, and the One campaign.

One thing Hounsou wants to make clear is that "Blood Diamond" is not a cinematic statement against the diamond industry. In fact, conflict diamonds account for only a small percentage of the world's diamond trade.

Still, there's nothing wrong with questioning from where your diamond comes, Hounsou said, because behind it may be a company profiting from other people's misery. That's where his involvement with another organization, Global Witness, comes into play.

"We're certainly not trying to discourage people from buying or wearing diamonds -- we all love diamonds and I love diamonds -- we don't want to make people self-conscious about it," Hounsou said.

"But at the end of the day, I'm concerned with how the diamond industry is doing business in Africa," he added. "The biggest consumers of diamonds don't actually know how they are being cultivated. That's why I'm a part of a big movement like this -- to try and educate people, and hopefully we can challenge companies to do what's right."