Kathryn Bolkovac, the Nebraska woman played by Rachel Weisz in "The Whistleblower," said she's proud of the movie first-time director and co-screenwriter Larysa Kondracki made and the reforms it may trigger.
She first saw the movie, about human sex trafficking in Bosnia and a coverup that involved United Nations peacekeepers, when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival a year ago. It moved her to tears.
Born in Ohio, Bolkovac moved with her family to Douglas, Neb., near Lincoln, when she was in third grade. She graduated from high school there in 1978. Her two daughters live in Lincoln and a son is in Kansas City, Mo. Her parents have since retired and moved to New Mexico.
Bolkovac knew the movie would take liberties for dramatic purposes, and she was happy to tease apart fact from fiction.
In the movie, she's a police officer with one child instead of three, and she has just lost custody in a divorce. She takes the high-paying U.N. peacekeeping job so she can afford to move to Georgia and be with her daughter.
In reality, she went to Bosnia 10 years after the divorce because she wanted to make money for her kids' college educations and to grow her career.
"My youngest daughter was 15 when I went to Bosnia, so that really was a kind of crisis, a young age to leave her," Bolkovac said. "But I have a great relationship with my kids."
In the movie, most characters are composites of real people. Names were changed to avoid legal hassles, since the film had a small budget. The private military contractor in charge of peacekeeping is called Democra Security in the movie. The real contractor is DynCorp, and it really did lose a lawsuit in England after firing Bolkovac for exposing the sex-trafficking.
And it really is still a multibillion-dollar defense contractor.
Raya, the teen sex slave Bolkovac most connects with in the movie, is also a composite of many girls 
"I was trained as a police officer to never cross that line and become so attached," she said. "I'm not a social worker. I was there to do the investigating, guide the police officers. But the email, the tape recordings, the follow-up on the case - that's all real. I didn't have to go back to steal those case files. I took them with me."
As hard as conditions for the girls
She visited the movie set for a week in November 2009 and found Weisz to be funny, down to earth and "a perfect pick" for the part, though she said Weisz is "petite, beautiful, gorgeous, and I'm 5-foot-10 and athletic."
Bolkovac visits Nebraska often. She and husband Jan, a Dutchman whom she meets in the movie, hope to retire to the Lincoln area one day. They live in the Netherlands, where she works for Ritchie Bros. auction house. After "The Whistleblower" was made, she wrote a book with the same title to give a more detailed, factual account of her time in Bosnia.
Contact the writer:
402-444-1269, bob.fischbach@owh.com
No comments:
Post a Comment