Rees discusses Whistleblower, sex trafficking

After a gala reception at Hanes Art Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last month, the local chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom held an advance screening of The Whistleblower, a based-on-a-true-story film due out in August about a U.N. sex trafficking scandal in post-war Bosnia.

At the reception before the film, guests and members of WILPF alike mingled with one another as well as with guest of honor Madeleine Rees, who is depicted in the film by Vanessa Redgrave. The former head of the Women’s Rights and Gender Unit for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rees worked closely during her time in Bosnia with Kathryn Bolkovac, an American police officer hired by DynCorp as part of the U.N. peacekeeping mission there. Bolkovac, the woman who first brought the sex trafficking scandal to light and who serves as the film’s main character, is played by Rachel Weisz.

The film, which Rees warned ahead of time would sully the high mood of the crowd following the reception, primarily follows Bolkovac, a Nebraskan investigator and recent divorcee, as she attempts a transition from local law enforcement to the perennially overcast world of U.N. peacekeeping in Bosnia in the 1990s. Based on the book written by Bolkovac herself, The Whistleblower eventually dives with her into a labyrinthine investigation of a dendritic and deep-seeded sex trafficking ring, the ranks of which reach well into the peacekeeping coalition itself. As she struggles to save lives—two in particular but many in general—Bolkovac comes to the creeping and related realizations that she is as much fighting criminal lowlife as she is peers and superiors, and that everyone around her either already knows about the sex trafficking or doesn’t want to.

Which is more or less where Rees comes in, both in the film as well as in real life. Though her influence on the events depicted in the film was vast, the screentime she is given seems limited. Rees, for her part, is unlikely to complain: Her concern lies far less with fanfare and self-promotion than it does with the promotion of awareness. The Whistleblower, despite its commercial status and summer release date, is a film that is primarily concerned with telling the stories of Bolkovac, Rees and sex trafficking in general to as many people as possible.

In fact, it was this initiative, Rees said, that influenced the decision of the filmmakers, with whom she worked closely over the course of five years (even to the extent of providing them with a place to stay for weeks at a time), to shoot the film as a theatrical narrative rather than the type of documentary that would have been more typical of the subject matter. The widespread release and well-known names attached to the film will hopefully help to draw large numbers of summer viewers, which will more than offset the negative effect of the lack in background information, as well as the frenetic pace it takes to try to cram its wide-ranging subject material into a short runtime—which Rees readily admits as a problem.

That is where The Whistleblower suffers: In its rush to include all of the details and particulars of the story it is trying to tell, it somewhat paradoxically risks passing them by. The details surrounding Bolkovac’s personal life—her divorce, the strained relations it produces with her daughter and the boyfriend with whom she shacks up within the first half hour of the film—are likely included as an attempt to humanize Bolkovac, but end up, in their hasty want of depth, doing the opposite. In conjunction with an extensive cast of nearly identical male characters, as well as a setting most likely unfamiliar to most American viewers, the marginal character development makes it difficult to identify with the issues Bolkovac faces personally within the film.

The issues she and Rees shared institutionally, however, are something else entirely, as evidenced by the reaction of the WILPF crowd following the screening. A question-and-answer session with Rees and Donna Bickford, the director of the UNC Women’s Center, gave viewers the opportunity to vent their frustrations, and to discuss courses of action for dealing with sex trafficking in the future. The scope of the discussion was limited to neither global nor domestic sex trafficking, but rather concerned the ways in which the two often overlap. It may be fitting, then, that the British-born Rees and her experiences in Bosnia made their way all the way to Chapel Hill for the night: If the issue itself is one that crosses strange and varied borders of countries, states and nations, then it should come as no surprise that its awareness initiatives might do the same.