The people of Sierra Leone have endured the most horrific acts of inhumanity in recent history. Kidnapping, slavery, forced amputation of limbs and brainwashing of children to create child soldiers are just a few realities for the victims that survived. Skylar from A pd posted a pop culture connection to a video, “The ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ lesson reminds me of a movie called “Blood Diamond”. In the movie, some journalists were in Africa trying to gather information about the illegal diamond harvests. They were almost always killed because if they dug any deeper, they would discover child soldiers and slavery of men, women and children. This is a lot like real life, where journalists were killed because the people they were reporting on didn’t like themselves being exposed.”
Students, This movie is rated R and you need your families’ permission to view the movie in its entirety. The trailer below is suitable for all audiences.
EXTRA CREDIT: Please watch and add to the discussion by expanding on how the trailer relates to our recent lessons.
Hi Ms D,
Yesterday, I was watching, The Day After Tomorrow, on FX, and before all of the storms hit, the three main characters were at, like, a trivia game. The first question was, what Incan leader was taken over by Francisco Pizzaro? That relates to our unit on Spanish Conquistadors and how they took over the Native Americans and made them slaves.
-Colin L Period
While my sister was watching Pixar Short Films the movie, I happened to glance the part of The Black Plague. This relates to your class when we learned about the Black Death.
The link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldZjaT4WXrA
This reminds me of one movie ‘We were soldiers’ that was based off a battle in the beginning of the Vietnam war (named the first actual battle.) The movie itself was based off a book written by a reporter who went there before any other. The reporters name was Joseph J. Galloway and he is a shining example of a reporter risking his life to tell the truth. During the course of the battle, he ended up aiding the soldiers fight the Vietnamese as well, making him a hero. When he came back to America, he reported nothing but the truth about what he saw.
http://www.weweresoldiers.net/joes-story.htm
Like Pearl,Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old cub reporter, put her life in danger to alert and inform the public as a reporter. Anastasia lived in Russia and was shot “execution-style recently by a masked man with a silenced pistol” as they walked near the Kremlin. It is an extremely risky business to be in, because people, if driven by enough hatred, don’t hesitiate to kill to protect their story from being let out. I suppose people that are in this situation don’t want to become scapegoats nor do they want people to find out, perhaps, crimes that they’ve committed, so they kill the reporter. Danny Pearl, too, risked his life for the good of the people. Evidentially,Baburova lost her life trying to inform the public of events due to a selfish human being that took her life away. This is similiar to Pearl’s story because they are both reporters that lost their lives trying to make the public aware of current events.
I thought this was a really good connection, it also reminds me of the journalist Danny Pearl in a sense, who went to Pakistan but ended up in danger like Leonardo DiCaprio in this movie except different locations of the world.