Jason Kohn’s muckraking documentary examines tensions within the diamond and jewelry commerce which are presently heating to magma-hot ranges over lab-grown diamonds, now being manufactured to such a excessive customary they’re indistinguishable from “pure” mined diamonds. That could be a huge downside for these with an curiosity in maintaining the 2 varieties of gem siloed off from each other in order that the costs for mined diamonds stays excessive. Many trade gamers, who management nearly all of the provision chains, need them to stay so.
However with a lot cash at stake and an trade swathed in secrecy, after all there’s more likely to be mischief and malfeasance afoot, with lab-grown diamonds doubtlessly being handed off as mined ones. One interviewee reckons as a lot as 20% of the diamonds offered as “actual” in jewelry retailers are literally lab-grown.
Managing to get entry to a number of the greatest names within the trade, together with De Beers CEO Stephen Lussier (who maybe not coincidentally retired this month), Kohn opens up a bijou microcosm of capitalism within the age of quantum replica. Lussier in all fairness frank that being within the diamond enterprise means additionally being within the mining and advertising companies – however all the identical he will get defensive and at one level hypes all the things his company has executed for Botswana. Kohn seems to query that argument by chopping in footage of a lion consuming an elephant.
Interlocuters elsewhere are way more partaking and persuasive. Designer Aja Raden, for instance, is eloquent and deliciously snarky concerning the diamond trade’s romanticised spin round “authenticity”, which is strictly the kind of assertion jewelry mogul Martin Rapaport provides all through the documentary. Elsewhere, affected person gemologist Dusan Simic tries to curiosity the trade in a approach of watermarking lab-grown diamonds so clients and retailers know what’s cultured and what’s not however – guess what – they don’t, on this movie, appear to need to know.
