The Whistleblower ( Larysa Kondracki, 2010): USA

Reviewed by Rhys Davis. Viewed at the Lobero Theater, SBIFF 2011

When I first received my tickets for the 2011 Santa Barbara Film Festival I had high expectations for this years line up. As you can guess  The Whistleblower starring Rachel Weisz was the first film I saw at the festival, and it certainly did not disappoint. A gripping true story about Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who decides to leave her job to work for the United Nations in Bosnia so she can make more money to move closer to her daughter. Only when she gets there she is welcomed to a country ravaged by war, and a society of men that treat women horribly with devastating effects.

As Bolkovac works on peacekeeping cases for the UN she is made aware of the treatment of women in post-war Bosnia. She ends up befriending a girl that is badly beat up, which ultimately leads her to a bar where girls are being trafficked for sex. As she digs deeper into the crime she discovers that this small time operation is much larger than she had ever imagined.

Bolkovac deals with her personal emotions of not being with her daughter throughout the film, which translates into her personal mission to save Raya and the rest of the kidnapped girls. Her ultimate struggle to reach these girls is that they trust no one because they have been so badly abused. The abusive and grotesque scenes of these girls being abused is very believable and well done for the first time director.

When I was watching this film i could not help but think of the movie Taken with Liam Neeson, but without all the gunfights. The scenes of torture and the antagonists in the film are comparable. Weisz’s and Neeson’s characters are both in a personal struggle, except Weisz’s character is dealing with the loss of her daughter by trying to save the girls, and uncover the lies and deceipt that shroud the people around her.

After the screening of the film I was privileged to be in the audience when director Larysa Kondracki came to the front and took questions from anyone. She told the crowd that she had been working on the film for eight years start to finish, and that it was her college thesis paper. This is Kondracki’s first full length motion picture, and the lack of experience does not show. Kondracki went on to say that many people wanted to make a movie form Bolkovac’s story, but that Bolkovac ended going with Kondracki, and giving her story up for one hundred dollars.

If your interested in a chilling true story and ready to see a thrilling drama then I recommend this film.