The Whistleblower (2011)

and still does. Its an interesting story with real life characters that are more interesting than fiction. However, the shaky cam, out of focus shots, hyper closeups, and quick cuts made the film too painful to make it anywhere close to half way through the movie. It was a movie that I really wanted to see, but its never going to happen. Its a real shame with the budget of this film that they couldn't afford a tripod, or steady cam rig. Or even a grown up editor. If I walk away from a movie nauseous and with a headache I can't reward the creators with a high score. Viewers aren't spending money on bigger 4k screens hoping for blurry and shaky camera-work. This story, and the real persons involved deserved a better effort than this.

This is one of the reviews where the movie making takes a backseat. The review basically is about the issue that the movie covers. To be honest, that is what I am going to do as well. While I watched this movie, I was extremely engrossed. The acting and direction did not really matter much, though I would say they were quite good. It was a perfectly woven story which start at a relatively gentle pace, then picks up in speed and continues with the tempo till the end. It conveys the idea that normal looking people can indulge in horrible acts when there is lack of accountability or fear of the law catching up. And after they have started, they get so sucked into the system, that they can easily act as professional criminals. The movie talks about a US police women who goes to US as a peace- keeping monitor. She finds herself in the middle of gross corruption, prejudice, plight of women and outright criminality. She gets sucked into the gender affairs office after she manages to get justice for a woman who had been badly abused by her husband. At the gender affairs office she comes across cases of trafficking of numerous east European women and later discovers that UN personnel and her colleagues are themselves involved. They are involved not just in exploitation but actual trafficking itself. The story moves around how she is threatened to shut up and how she fights back and the fate of some of the trafficked girls. It is a moving performance. But as I mentioned earlier, the review is more about the issues that the movie raises and not necessarily about the acting and direction. And the worst part is that the movie is based on a true story.

This is possibly the most shocking feature film based upon real events which I have ever seen. As the extras (called 'Bonus') on the DVD make clear, every single episode is based upon events which really happened. The only alterations made in the film were in the conflation of multiple persons into single persons for the sake of dramatic clarity. Every detail of what happens to the girls in the film really happened to the real girls being portrayed. The film is so alarming in the massive and systematic corruption and evil which it exposes, that one's faith in international institutions like the United Nations is completely shattered. No wonder the brilliant female director of the film, Larysa Kondracki, has never directed a feature film again, but only TV episodes for series. Everyone must be absolutely terrified of her! What will she reveal next? The real whistleblower who broke this story to the world, Kathryn Bolkovac, not only really exists, but she is interviewed in the extras. She also is credited twice, as story consultant and at the head of thanks. But Bolkovac (an American of Croatian descent) was thrown out of the United Nations team and has never been able to get a job with any international agency again, because of the internal horrors which she exposed. This is all too familiar, as everyone in today's world who dares to tell the truth or tries to expose corruption is relentlessly hounded and persecuted, but never rewarded or praised. So corrupt has our world of today become. I would go so far as to say that the world has never in its entire history been as corrupt as it is now, and that is really saying something, considering what we know from history. Rachel Weisz plays Bolkovac, the lead character in the film, and it may be her finest performance. This film stimulated the people making it to rise to a high level because they all shared the same outrage at the events being portrayed. Vanessa Redgrave plays an honest United Nations Commissioner, and the real woman whom she portrays and who supported Bolkovac's whistleblowing is also interviewed in the extras on the DVD. The film was a Canadian-German co-production, probably because no one connected with the United States would touch it, as the corruption exposed was mostly amongst Americans working for the U.N. The film is mostly set in Bosnia, and Romania was used as the shooting location for that. Monica Bellucci plays a shifty UN executive who compromises other people's lives away in the bureaucratic battles inside the U.N. The Romanian actress Roxana Condurache who plays the girl Raya in this film is due to play Lauren Bacall in the forthcoming film BOGIE AND BACALL, due to shoot next year. That is highly appropriate, considering that Lauren Bacall was a Romanian Jew. All the acting in this film is high intensity and mesmerising. The direction is superb. The director, Kondracki, is a Canadian of Ukrainian descent. (For those who do not know, Canada has had a large number of Ukrainian immigrants living there for decades, the first of them to enter the Hollywood film scene having been actor Jack Palance (1919-2006), who is still very much a hero to the Canadian Ukrainian community.) Kondracki and writer Ellis Kirwan worked for years on this project, researching the subject, interviewing survivors and witnesses, and spending time with the real life Bolkovac. I believe the budget for this film was only a tiny $6 million. Everyone pitched in to make this film on a shoestring because they believed in it and the importance of its message getting across to the public. I suspect that many people worked on it for next to nothing. It is a magnificent and mind-boggling achievement, of the highest professional standard and level of excitement and intense nail-biting drama. Everyone involved can be proud. As for the subject matter and the story, I tremble to relate the full horror of it. As I write this, a scandal of 1400 young girls having been raped within about five years by gangs in Rotherham, a single town in Britain, has recently come to light, and the collusion of many police and council officials and others in authority has been headline news. But so far none of those officials has suffered any disciplinary action. So what is related in this film is eerily prescient. What the film shows is the systematic abuse of huge numbers of kidnapped girls who have been turned into sex slaves by human traffickers. But the worst part of it is that this was done in collusion with large numbers of United Nations personnel, mostly Americans. Most of them were working for a private company given the fictional name of Democra in the film, which later makes it plain that the real company went on to enjoy contracts worth billions in Iraq and Afghanistan. It does not take a great deal of imagination to work out what company it is. This wicked outsourcing of military work to private contractors by governments and international agencies is an open invitation to abuses of the worst kind, and raping, torturing, and even killing young girls who have been sold into slavery is just about as bad as it gets. That is what this film is about. Furthermore, none of the real persons was ever charged or imprisoned. The incidents all took place in Bosnia after the end of the war there, when the UN 'peacekeepers', or should I say gang rapists, were enjoying their diplomatic immunity to do any illegal thing they wanted, including taking an active part in the human trafficking and smuggling of girls in U.N. transport across borders. And remember this: no one was punished. Just think about that. The brave Kathryn Bolkovac deserves a medal. So does Elysa Kondracki. But when are we going to do something to stop these nightmarish crimes?

As one gets older it gets harder and harder to be shocked with the state of humanity." The Whistleblower", gripping and unflinching thriller manages just that,to shock beyond comprehension. We all know that wars awaken the worst in people, that thin veneer of civility scratches very fast or that the deprived among us quickly seize the opportunity to do abominable things, usually under the sickening guise of patriotism. But what can we say when the peacekeepers and the human rights groups take sadistic advantage of already devastated people. Somehow that seems even more sociopathic than your run of the mill war criminal. And these creatures didn't even get punished. They are back to their perfect families and church pews. The trouble is that these awakened monsters will have hard time pretending to be normal. Pandora's box is open. Are we that naive or just that reckless? We'll find out. Every fire that doesn't get put out on time burns everything in sight.