Directed by Jason Kohn
Featuring Martin Rapaport, Aja Raden, and Stephen Lussier
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 27 minutes
Showing October 29 at the Philadelphia Film Festival; In theaters, November 11.

by Gary M. Kramer, Staff Writer

One facet—pardon the pun—of the Wedding Industrial Complex is the diamond engagement ring, a symbol of love and “forever.” Some folks refer to it as the “diamond dream,” that big romantic moment a young girl waits for all her life.

But, as the illuminating documentary Nothing Lasts Forever shows, that diamond may not be real—nor may it be valuable. Despite the price put on natural diamonds, synthetics and “mixes” have been penetrating the market, which could make that precious diamond, well, not so precious. 

Filmmaker Jason Kohn investigates this insider industry, traveling around the world to diamond mines and markets and interviewing key players. A strength of his film is that it presents information and lets viewers decide who or what to believe. Stephen Lussier, an executive VP job at De Beers (he left that job earlier this year), recounts the stories that were used to market diamonds and later explains why De Beers suddenly decided to go into creating a line of synthetics, squeezing out upstarts like John Janik. (Janik does have a great story about the ring he offered his girlfriend when he proposed to her.) 

Meanwhile, Martin Rapaport, who sets the pricing on natural diamonds, does not want to set pricing for synthetics because that destroys not only the integrity of the industry, but the truth and trust and the value inherent in marriages. What would it mean about the relationship if a wife learned that the ring she thought was a natural diamond was, in fact, a synthetic? 

One of the issues, the film explains, is that it is harder to tell naturals from synthetic. So, the real could be a fake, and a greedy diamond seller is possibly committing fraud by selling a gem at a price that is not what it is actually worth. 

Nothing Lasts Forever has these engaging subjects espouse and defend their positions—and frequently repeat themselves—as they consider how the diamond market is changing as a result of synthetics being undetectable and not identifiable. 

But the film’s best talking head is the sole female interviewee, Aja Raden, a jewelry designer who is incredibly compelling and highly convincing as she debunks diamond myths. She claims that diamonds are not as rare or as scarce as we have been told. That every time an auction house “finds” a valuable diamond there is a “story” behind it. She maintains that these lies have become the truth and does it with such panache, even pauses to applaud De Beers for manipulating consumers for all these years. 

Nothing Lasts Forever ends with gemologist Dusan Simic hoping to use science to reverse-engineer things and create a real diamond from a fake one—if that is possible. 

Kohn’s film provides an interesting peek behind the curtain of an industry that has long been hiding its flaws in plain sight.