UN food agency enlists Blood Diamond film stars in war against hunger

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has enlisted two stars of the new film Blood Diamond, set against the backdrop of the devastating chaos and civil war that enveloped Sierra Leone in the 1990s, to help raise much-needed awareness of the hunger and poverty that stalk more than 850 million people around the world.

Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly will ask and answer a critical question in a new public service announcement for WFP, which hopes that the film’s scenes depicting aid operations, such as the agency’s feeding of thousands of war victims who fled within Sierra Leone and to neighbouring countries, will provide a strong message.

The question: “What is so powerful that it can make you overcome your greatest fear…turn your brother into an enemy…and leave wounds that scar long after the fighting is over? What is so potent, it passes effortlessly from mother to child…from generation to generation?”

The answer: “Hunger – so deadly it kills 25,000 people a day.”

In the Sierra Leone crisis WFP aid workers witnessed acute humanitarian needs and untold levels of violence and cruelty, similar to those depicted in the movie.

“Hunger is often the root cause of desperate acts by desperate people,” WFP Director of Communications Neil Gallagher said. “Cinema is a very powerful medium to help generate greater awareness and concern about hunger, an issue largely ignored and little understood in the western world, where most people are far more worried about their waistlines.”

Blood Diamond director Edward Zwick said: “As filmmakers, we want to be accurate and, in so many circumstances, the World Food Programme has been at the centre of refugee camps and present in countries in distress – in Sierra Leone and in other places. So if we, in the context of a movie, can put that image and the knowledge in front of a whole host of people who don’t know about it, then we’re hopefully doing well by them.”

Some of the photographs used in the film trailer are part of a WFP/Benetton campaign launched in 2003, called Hunger, which featured powerful, intimate photos of war victims, including ex-combatants and amputees.