Kingsley to Appear in Quake Documentary
Ben Kingsley will be featured in a documentary about the devastation caused by last year's earthquake in Pakistan that flattened entire villages in the country's portion of Kashmir and surrounding areas.
The documentary by director Chip Duncan is being made in partnership with Relief International, a Los Angeles-based aid organization. Pakistan's government also supported the project.
Relief International is worried that not enough food aid is in the pipeline for survivors of the Oct. 8 quake, which killed 87,000 people and left about 3 million homeless.
Duncan said he expected the documentary would be released on U.S. public television later this year. Excerpts will be used for fundraising, he said.
Kingsley, who spent five days in the Pakistan-controlled portion of Kashmir, told reporters in Islamabad on Wednesday that he would like to eliminate the phrase, "We must respect our differences," from the "lazy vocabulary of political rhetoric."
"We must embrace our similarities. We are far more similar as human beings than we are different," the 62-year-old British actor said.
"When you see a woman crying because she can't find her child under 4 million tons of rubble, that's humanity," he said, referring to the total mass of rubble estimated to have been created by the quake.
"We all have moms, dads, brothers, sisters and grandparents who we'd miss terribly if they disappeared in 26 seconds," he added, referring to the duration of the magnitude-7.6 disaster.
Kingsley, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, is popular in South Asia for his Oscar-winning performance as the Indian resistance leader Mahatma Gandhi in "Gandhi."
One reporter in the predominantly Pakistani media crowd asked Kingsley if he had been in any movies since "Gandhi."
Kingsley good-naturedly replied that he has made 40 films and has been nominated for four Oscars since "Gandhi."
"But at least you saw one of my films, so I'm delighted about that," he added.