Sarajevo on film 2010 United States / Canada / Germany
The Whistleblower
A Nebraska policewoman uncovers a trafficking scandal in post-war Bosnia — and learns what the international community prefers not to see.
- Director
- Larysa Kondracki
- Year
- 2010
- Language
- English
- Country
- United States / Canada / Germany
- Genre
- thriller, drama
The Whistleblower is set in the aftermath that the siege films do not reach: post-war Bosnia, after the peacekeepers arrived. It is based on the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer who took a contract with the UN in Sarajevo and, while investigating ordinary complaints, uncovered a network trafficking women into the region’s peacekeeping economy — a scandal that implicated the very international community she worked for. When she reported it, she became the problem. Rachel Weisz plays Bolkovac; the film is based on her sworn testimony and the investigations that followed.
Larysa Kondracki directed it as her debut in 2010, and it is one of the few films to treat the post-war city as its subject: the Sarajevo of international missions, security contractors, and the ordinary population living beside them. It is a hard, angry film, and its subject is a real scar of the city’s post-war decade.
For a visitor, it completes the picture the memorials begin: the war’s aftermath was not only reconstruction. It is the film to watch if you want the post-Dayton Sarajevo, not the one in the brochures.
Critical reception
The film holds a 75% Tomatometer and a Metacritic score of 59, with Rachel Weisz’s performance the near-universal point of praise — Ebert called the film one to fill you with rage.
Public reception and legacy
The film’s impact is inseparable from the real case it dramatised: Kathryn Bolkovac was fired after exposing the trafficking network and won a wrongful-dismissal tribunal against DynCorp in London in 2002, awarded £110,221 in damages. After the film’s release, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosted a screening and opened a panel on sexual exploitation by peacekeepers; Bolkovac was later nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The film screened in Sarajevo and Mostar in 2014 with Bolkovac present, and holds a 71% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
What the critics said
“Ms. Weisz's feisty performance is the strongest element of 'The Whistleblower.'”Read the review →
“Here is a film to fill you with rage.”Read the review →
Portrait: Sound Opinions · CC BY-SA 2.0