Press Release Author = Ed Remington, Diamond Films
Industry = Entertainment
Press Release Summary = Diamond Films today announced (news release attached) that it has completed production on its highly-anticipated bioterrorism thriller, Death Without Consent, and that it is engaged in talks with motion picture distributors for a mid-2007 global release. The hot-button issue of bioterrorism has been inflamed by the recent killing of a former Russian spy with a radioactive element that left trace elements aboard aircraft and possibly infected others.
Press Release Body = FILMMAKER TURNS SIGHTS ON STATE-SPONSORED BIOTERRORISM IN NEW MOVIE, DEATH WITHOUT CONSENT Pentagon Insider Turned Filmmaker Gives Chilling Insight Into \'Germ Warfare\'
Potomac, Md., December 5, 2006 - Diamond Films, an independent film producer, today announced that it has completed production on its highly-anticipated bioterrorism thriller, Death Without Consent, and that it is engaged in talks with motion picture distributors for a mid-2007 global release.
The new feature film is directed and produced by Vera Chawla, a former Pentagon insider and executive vice president of ISN, a federal government contractor, who has worked closely on bioterrorism issues for many years.
Filmed in the Washington, D.C. area, the movie will reinvigorate conspiracy buffs and send chills down the spines of government officials because it shows how vulnerable the nation is to a bioterrorism attack. The recent killing of a former Russian spy with a radioactive element that left trace elements aboard aircraft and possibly infected others has also flamed the issue.
\"Bioterrorism is clearly a weapon of choice and its use as a weapon of mass destruction is a terrifying aspect we must confront,\" said Andrew Bilinski, former deputy assistant secretary for the United States Air Force (USAF), Department of Defense (DoD). \"Many high-ranking officials in Washington are going to find that that Death Without Consent hits way too close to home,\" \"It is a wake-up call for our government.\"
The threat of bioterrorism is hardly fiction. \"Death Without Consent depicts our lack of preparation as a nation for a bioterrorism attack on an unfathomable scale,\" said Kshitij Mohan, chairman and CEO of Cytomedix, a leading biotechnology company based in Rockville, Md. \"The movie clearly points out how vulnerable we are and the need to devote more time and research into combating the effects of known and potentially unknown pathogens,\" added Mohan, who has also served as the top science and technology officer at leading medical technology companies, such as Baxter and Boston Scientific.
Inspired By Pentagon Experience; Filmed in Greater DC Area
The screenplay, unique in that it depicts secret medical experiments conducted by world super powers rather than by \'terrorist states\', is about a college student named Chris Carrington, who learns that his father was killed by a Russian scientist\'s biochemical viral weapon, rather than by natural causes. He learns that both he and his sibling have now inherited this fatal disease.
Torn between a crisis-of-faith and the love he holds for the daughter of the Russian scientist implicated in the atrocities, Carrington races against time on many fronts. The mystery-suspense plot takes a myriad of unexpected twists and turns, as he attempts to break through the bureaucratic nightmare he encounters from law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, which prevent him from discovering the truth.
\"The cast features highly experienced and veteran talent from Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.,\" said Chawla, who also wrote the screenplay. \"I chose actors with reputations slightly under the radar screen in order to treat the subject matter with more credibility, depth and alarm.\"
Several cast members are on the Hollywood fast track. The second male lead in the movie, for example, was the second male lead from Under the Tuscan Sun with Diane Lane. The score for the film was written by Harry Manfredini, whose music has been responsible for the success of many thrillers at the box office, including all the Friday the 13th films. The editing was headed by Kris Cole, whose credits includes over 40 Hollywood features, and finished by Dennis Virkler, another editor responsible for major Hollywood blockbusters, including the recent hit, The Guardian, starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher.
Movie Reveals Real-Life Threat
The movie steps unnervingly close to topics Chawla isn\'t allowed to talk about.
Although the screenplay is written as fiction, the film is based on fact. All the information in the movie, outside the fictional characters, is factual, including the statements about Russia\'s stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, such as the plague and smallpox viruses. Chawla\'s early work at the Pentagon in the 1970\'s focused on issues with the Soviet Union.
\"Under the guise of a mystery-thriller, the film explains a big historical fact. And that is that biological weapons of mass destruction can not be proven effective unless they are tested on humans. Such human experiments,\" said Chawla, \"are conducted en masse, subjecting innocent groups of people in various countries to unspeakable evil. Unbeknownst to most of the population, there is a covert underground of black marketers who deal in the trade of biological weapons of mass destruction. It is this and other critical facts about germ warfare that are revealed in this movie.\"
It is well known that Russian laboratories created forms of smallpox that could be used to cause pandemics all over the world. It is estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 technicians once involved in the programs are now presumed to have gone to countries that are willing to pay them for their knowledge, their expertise, and their samples.
In the U.S., Chawla said people will recall how LSD was used by CIA and Army scientists during the 1940s and 50s, with the hope that the drug would be useful in warfare and intelligence gathering. What should alarm people,\" said Chawla, \"is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The thought that deadly bioterrorism diseases can be passed on from one generation to another should scare the living \'H\' out of people.\"
Laurie Garrett, author of the book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, has written extensively on bioterrorism and told National Geographic News that the fear of a rogue nation or individual terrorist turning a disease into a weapon of mass destruction is well founded. When asked if the US could see an attack within ten years, Garrett, the only journalist to have earned the Peabody, Polk and Pulitzer awards, said: \"I don\'t know that we will, but I know that we would be insane to assume that we won\'t.\"
Although state-sponsored bioterrorism experiments are not new, Chawla said bringing the details of present-day bioterrorism to the big screen has been difficult for obvious reasons - \"the subject is not intended for public consumption.\"
More recently, the 2005 movie, The Constant Gardener, exposed secret drug testing by the big pharmaceutical companies in Northern Kenya. While the movie was also labeled a work of \'fiction\', John le Carre, author of the book upon which the movie is based, has said that the story is \"as tame as holiday postcard.\" Death Without Consent builds upon the issue by bringing it \'front and center\' to the American public.
Chawla, a child actress, started directing theatrical plays as a student at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. In the U.S., she starred in a host of theatrical productions during her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Virginia. As an executive in the high-tech industry, Chawla worked for NASA and on classified government contracts with Boeing, GE & ISN, during which time she was stationed for a number of years at the Pentagon.
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ABOUT DIAMOND FILMS Diamond Films, an independent producer of films and shorts, is based in Bethesda, Maryland. The company is owned and operated by Vera Chawla, a former Pentagon insider and high-tech executive turned filmmaker. Chawla has long been involved in cinema arts, both as an actress and producer of many shorts. Death Without Consent is her first feature-length film. The trailer to the movie can be accessed on the following link, http://www.DeathWithoutConsent.com.
CONTACT: Ed Remington Office: 301-469-6933 Cell: 703-282-2227
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