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| Girls working the Streets of Bosnia. |
You can never do enough to raise peoples awareness of the
despicable traffic in women and girls when they are transported from one place
to another for the sole purpose of sex and making money for ‘pimps’ and
‘gangsters’ on the back of the misery generated by this evil trade.
Larysa Kondracki is a Canadian film director and
screenwriter her debut feature film tackles this subject once again.
Canada/German coproduction The Whistleblower (2010), similar to
Sex
Traffic (2004), bases its narrative on a true story. An American police
officer Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz) takes a job working as a peacemaker in
post-war Bosnia. Although she expects to be involved in the rebuilding of this
war torn country her good intentions are dashed when she uncovers ‘a dangerous reality of corruption, cover-up
and intrigue amid a world of private contractors and multinational diplomatic
doubletalk’[1]
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| Rachel Weisz with Kathryn Bolkovac. |
It was this realization and her need to confront the
truth that put Bolkovac in a precarious position. “For me it was really
shocking,” Bolkovac, explains, “because I felt that my motives were genuine and
I was here to help. I wasn’t here to hunt down police bad guys…when I began
investigating the internal corruption involvement of our own police forces and
our own internationals in the sick world of trafficking, I didn’t expect the
backlash that I got.” As she dug deeper and deeper, the situation became
untenable and because she was a threat to the face of the rebuilding project in
Bosnia, the powers that be found an excuse to fire her. Bolkovac, being the
person she is, filed a wrongful dismissal case against her employers and
finally cleared her name in 2001.[2]
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| Rachel Weisz as Bolkovac. |
Tagged as the movie the United Nations would prefer
you didn’t see because of accusations that the U.N. top brass, the US State
Department and again similar to Sex
Traffic, a corrupt major US contractor who is contracted to supply American
police for U.N. missions are all heavily implicated. Indecently the same
company is still raking in US dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan under contract to
the State Department. (Nothing
ever changes)
As well as Weisz the film stars Vanessa Redgrave,
Monica Bellucci and David Strathairn. It was filmed mainly on location in
Romania and my only gripe with the movie itself is that some of the dialog was
pretty difficult to understand which always tends to impair your enjoyment of
what is potentially a worthwhile film.
