When director Jason Cohn was 13, he sat with his mother in front of the TV at their home in a New York suburb, and they watched a show on the Russian Diamond Exchange. “They said there that the rarity attributed to diamonds is nothing but a myth,” Cohn recalls, “and my mother, who had just worn diamond earrings she had received from my father when they were still married, immediately said ‘Oh God, so diamonds are not that rare, there are so many of them.’ “I clearly remember that despite this discovery her opinion of diamonds did not change in the slightest. The value of the diamond, the story of its antiquities, its rarity, its specialness, was so ingrained in it that it was not harmed. .
A decade later, in 2003, Cone was exposed to an article in American Wired magazine entitled “The New Diamond Age,” which dealt with synthetic diamonds, also known as lab diamonds or rhinestones. He showed that although it is a long-standing industry, the development of advanced production technology will allow it to dominate to some extent the natural diamond industry in the future. “This article made me believe,” says Cohn, “that the natural diamond industry can be wiped out. But I wondered why this has not happened until now, why the natural diamond industry remains honest. I began to think a lot not only about the power of the story imprinted in us, which is “Among us, according to which a diamond is valuable, it is forever, it is rare and special – but also about the story of the war between natural diamonds and synthetic diamonds.”
These two founding moments are the seeds for his film “Nothing (Forever Forever”), which will be screened this week at the Dokaviv Festival (until June 5, later to be broadcast on yes docu and HOT 8), and deals with the sparkling stone that is so significant in our eyes and industry. Which threatens to be ousted from this class.
Director Jason Conn. ” There’s a real risk in doing a docu on something that’s going on right now. You never know where it’s going ” / Photo: Rome Film Fest – Red Carpet
In an exclusive Zoom interview, Conn tells about his cross-continental journey in factories, giant polishers and diamond conferences. Thus, for about a decade, he managed to trace the evolution of the thriving industry. But on the way he had two surprising revelations.
Cone found that synthetic industrial diamonds (those whose quality is not high enough to be used for decoration, and are therefore intended for industrial uses by inlaying them in drills for the oil industry for example or for polishing glass, stone surfaces and the like) are rolled into polishes and finally inlaid in jewelry
The second discovery exposed to it is that synthetic diamonds, which are declared as such, are mixed in unimaginable quantities within shipments of natural diamonds.
Chando Sheta, who owns a diamond polisher in Surat, India, tells the film candidly that he mixes, and also explains why: At the age of 12 he came to Surat, where he worked in a diamond polisher and slept with the mosquitoes. As such he realized he could never afford to own a diamond. But then, he says, “I heard that in China diamonds are made in a new process.” Today, he says, “millions of carats of synthetic diamonds are flooding the market, but no one wants to complain.” In other words, the natural diamond industry knows, but preferred that the secret not be revealed.
“No out-of-industry journalistic article has ever reported what’s going on in this area,” Conn adds. “Until the movie came out, no one knew at all that natural and synthetic diamonds were mixed for many years. But we definitely revealed the story.”
“Selling the Diamond Idea”
To talk about this exposure we need to understand for a moment how the diamond became what it is, how it happened that its decoration gives us so much happiness and pride, and we perceive it as one that must be guarded. Stephen Lucier, senior vice president of the De Beers Diamond Corporation, which controls the mining, distribution and marketing of rough and polished diamonds worldwide, is the man responsible for this to some extent.
De Beers’ old slogan, “Diamonds are forever,” was coined many years ago. But her equally powerful slogan, “The Diamond Dream,” the one that has accompanied De Beers for quite a few years, is the fruit of his creation. “If you want people to absorb information, you have to know how to tell it to them in a way that is etched in memory,” he says in the film. “That’s the definition of a storyteller.” De Beers is considered a monopoly with great power in the industry and therefore evokes quite a bit of antagonism. But it is also the cause of the most damage from the rhinestone industry.
Martin Rapaport, the official global estimator of diamond prices / Photo: Reuters, Nir Elias
Martin Rapaport, owner of the Rappaport Group, the official global evaluator of diamond value, notes in the film that for him the diamond is “a sign of absolute commitment and love. It must be precious, because the woman casts from its value on herself.” “I think Martin manages to effectively convey the subjective way we experience a story,” Cohn says.
These are things that cause some inconvenience in the context of gender equality.
“If you are raised to give value to an object like a diamond, and that value is related to your self-worth and your perception of your relationship, that’s the way you think.”
Rappaport vehemently refuses to include synthetic diamonds in his price lists so as not to give them legitimacy: “We are not really selling diamonds, but the idea behind them. The guys from synthetic manufacturing are like parasites under our skin. They are trying to steal the diamond dream.”
“People want diamonds because they were told to like them,” says Aja Raden, a Los Angeles jewelry designer, in the film. “Hundreds of millions of people have been convinced for years that they want diamonds.” And if a real diamond is a lie, she adds, then a rhinestone is a lie for a lie.
“It’s basically the story the film tells,” says Con, “what makes us attribute value to things, and what the connection is between the origin of that value and the power of the story that accompanies it. It’s a subject that has always fascinated me. It has not changed in the process. To unexpected places. “
“Synthetic has no value without the natural”
In his film, Cone chooses to focus on Dushan Simic, a refugee who fled Serbia to New York during the wars that accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and a gemologist (gem researcher). Simic was probably the first to warn about the mixing phenomenon, meaning that the natural diamond packages that reach the jewelry industry also hide some synthetic “bastards”. In 2012, he tested such packages, publishing that about 5% of them were synthetic. The industry refused to accept the news, and De Beers issued a press release stating that they had inspected thousands of stones and found not a single artificial stone.
“For me the film is also about the man who tries to save the diamond industry,” says Conn. “He was loyal to the industry, and continues to be someone who really cares about her, even though she ignores what he wants to give her. I do not know if he is a tragic figure, but there was a tragic element in the fact that he was ignored.
Gemologist Simich Duchamp (pictured, from the film) / Photo: Screenshot from Showtime Documentary Films and Kilo Films
“When I met him around 2015, it was very exciting. He seemed to me a bit like the Blade Runner from the 1982 film (the private detective, played by Harrison Ford, who tries to distinguish between real people and androids – SL), and he was also the first person I interviewed that he was not a manufacturer of diamonds, and his business was not dependent on promoting diamonds of any kind.
“It was a breakthrough because when I started the film, no one was talking about synthetic diamonds. It was a taboo in the industry. Even the synthetic diamond makers were not keen on talking about it, in part because behind the scenes there were competitions and fights between them.”
As for the phenomenon of mixing in the Israeli Diamond Exchange, they note that “in any case, such a thing can not happen in Israel, as there is strict regulation here. Years. “
One of the producers of synthetic diamonds tells in the film how he grew a synthetic diamond for his fiancée (its production involves a process of formation, which mimics the way diamonds are formed in the belly of the earth), made sure they cut and polished it – and then offered her marriage. But when he gave it to her she was not impressed, for the diamond was too small. The two did not marry in the end, and the size of the diamond, he suggests, certainly played a role in that. That is, the same product that was supposed to disrupt the idea of the pure diamond was judged in exactly the same metrics.
“A synthetic diamond has no value without a natural diamond,” says Cone. “Therefore the mythology of the diamond must never be destroyed. To me it is fascinating: on the one hand there is inherent competition between the two products, but on the other hand there is a symbiotic connection between them.”
De Beers’ way of dealing with this symbiosis was – if you can not hide them, offer them yourself. In 2019, the company came out with a line of rhinestones called “Lightbox”. The campaign made sure to make it clear that real diamonds are meant for significant events, and artificial for small gifts or for travel abroad, because unlike natural diamonds, it is not terrible if they get lost along the way.
“A film that reflects both sides”
It is not by chance that the diamond industry has always occupied Conn (43). He grew up in the suburbs of New York with Jewish parents – his mother immigrated from Brazil and his father from Argentina – and every weekend he would come to town to work at his grandfather’s store on 46th Street, close to the Diamond Quarter. “In Times Square in the 1980s and 1990s, there was an old world of Jewish tradition around diamonds,” he says. “The family knew diamond dealers. I always felt it was a kind of backyard.”
Growing up, he studied at the University of Boston, in a program of history, European culture and cinema, and towards the end of his studies he worked as an intern with two directors, one of whom was the director of documentaries for television. “I hated working with him, he did poorly documented, artless and uninteresting documentation. I thought a documentary didn’t have to be a completely different animal from a fictional film. It could be some kind of genre in the same cinematic art. I never wanted to do a documentary to find out some truth. The only reason I like it is because it’s part of filmmaking. “
One of the barriers he encountered was the economic one. “One of the tragic things about making documentaries is that if you were not born rich, it’s a profession that’s very difficult to make a living from. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. “So I started directing TV commercials. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. Starting ‘Diamonds (Not) Forever’ was also an attempt to get out of advertising.”
Conn resigned, invested in the film some of the big money he made in advertising, received several grants along the way, but was unable to really fund it to the end. Redemption came after the second film he released, in 2017, “Love Means Zero”. “The main producer told me: ‘Let’s keep working together, what else do you have in mind? I told him I’ve been working on a movie for a long time and I would really like to finish it. And he made it happen.
“There’s a real risk in making a documentary about something that happens now. You never know where it’s going, and there’s a fear of losing the money invested. But the same producer took the risk, and in 2018 the film finally started to move forward.”
You talk about taking risks, but there is an issue you have chosen not to touch on almost in the film – the quarrelsome diamonds, also known as blood diamonds (which are mined in combat and conflict zones and sold to buy weapons and kill many people).
“The main reason was that it was not part of our story, which dealt with man-made diamonds. The second reason is that it has been written by many.”
Quite a few people see De Beers as an almost vicious cartel. There are such statements in the film, but the corporation gets a broad stage to express its position.
“There is a misconception about whether our role as documentary filmmakers is to judge. On the one hand to say ‘I do not judge’ is a façade creation of objectivity, and I do not think there is anything objective in art. But for me it is not a judgmental film, but reflects all sides. “And if it’s a war of narratives, it was important to me to bring all the narratives, and that of De Beers was very important. Part of the fun is to allow the audience to reach their insights on their own.”
Have you ever purchased a diamond yourself?
“No. I ordered artificial mousse (very rare mineral from which fake diamonds are made) for my partner. It is the closest material a diamond has, both in terms of hardness and appearance. But chemically it is not a diamond, and a simple machine can tell the difference. There is a very interesting story around it. Once they started synthesizing it, the person who did it started injecting moussenets into diamond packages, then marketing people testing machines, and making more money than from selling the mousseite itself. I loved these diamonds because of the story, but they are also very beautiful. “
How do you know your diamond is natural?
1. A diamond will be accompanied by a gemological certificate from a designated laboratory, such as GIA (the official American Gemological Organization), which also ranks it. The difference between a certificate given for a natural diamond and that of a synthetic diamond is found in the small print: the certificate that accompanies the laboratory diamond will state “undergone treatment”.
2. The Diamond Exchange has devices that are accessible to those who are defined as members of the Exchange. They scan the diamond and immediately report whether it is natural or synthetic.
What do lab diamonds do for the American market?
■ Sales of lab-studded jewelry in the U.S. account for 6% -5% of sales of natural diamond-studded jewelry.
■ About 28% of U.S. engagement ring buyers in 2021 opted for lab diamonds.
■ Expenditure on an engagement ring set with a natural diamond in the U.S. averaged $ 8,000 in 2021, compared to $ 4,000 for a lab diamond