We discussed the B word (“Bosnian sex trafficking”, okay so it’s three words) with The Whistleblower director Larysa Kondracki. Her debut feature, with an envious cast that includes Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave, tells the true story of Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska cop who finds more than a fast and fat paycheck when she accepts a contract as a U.N. peacekeeper in Bosnia—i.e. a sex trafficking ring that stretches beyond the locals to the peacekeepers themselves and beyond.
Christine Champ: So this is your first feature, why did you choose sex trafficking as the topic?
Larysa Kondracki: Well I’m Ukranian-Canadian so it was a topic that people were talking about in my community. It was sort of before the phrase sex trafficking was popular, and it was just unbelievably interesting and compelling. When I found Kathy’s story well … it’s just something that grips you and you gotta do it.
CC: How did you discover Kathryn’s story?
LK: I had read a book called “The Natashas” by Victor Malarek, a Canadian reporter. He talked about the U.N.’s involvement in this in it, and sort of sex trafficking and what it is . It was a great book and in it there was this part about Kathy and it was just a small part, but I found it very interesting. I Googled her and the press was huge. She’d just won her tribunal. It was mostly in Europe though. I found her email in a chat room and I wrote her a letter, and the next day she wrote me back. She had just won so apparently she’d had some interest from European countries but she wasn’t able to entertain them. Within a few weeks I wrote a letter to the Ukranian Canadians. My mother distributed it forcefully and we had 30,000 dollars and Eilis [co-writer Eilis Kirwan] and I spent two years based in Dublin while Kathy was in Amsterdam. We spent two years traveling all over Eastern Europe meeting everyone from high level diplomats to underground NGOs that were hiding, and really getting a sense of the world and writing the whole time.
CC: So Kathy was directly involved with the writing of the script?
LK: Oh yeah she was always very available.
CC: This seems like the sort of topic you often see in documentaries, why did you decide to make it a drama?
LK: I guess I just don’t know how to make a documentary. I was at film school at Columbia and films like Monster, High Art, Boys Don’t Cry, were coming out and it just seemed very much in the now at the time. It was very possible… with last year’s films like Black Swan, Winter’s Bone, even King’s Speech I think we’re getting out of that five-year period where, and to be fair I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else, we were going through– I don’t like to call it the war on terror–that issue and economic decline and people needed to get away. But you look at Tree of Life which did really well this weekend, so I think people are hungry for good stories again.
CC: What do you think is the advantage (if any) of making it a drama vs. a documentary?
LK: I love documentaries you know and I think especially now they’re getting very compelling. I personally don’t know how to do that…I think what’s really interesting to people is that Kathy was an ordinary woman she doesn’t have a skill set that none of us can possess. And especially through a performance like Rachel’s which was so great, it’s a very relatable character and so possibly through a drama instead of a doc you’re able to experience what she goes through and that’s sort of part of the fun. I call it fun [laughs].
CC: How did you manage to cast such notable actors like Weisz and Redgrave, especially in your first film?
LK: At the end of the day the answer really comes down to the story. The script got out there… it circulated with agents. I thought Weisz was incredible. She was our first choice. At the time we gave it to her but she was pregnant and she couldn’t really go there, but she kept checking in. There where different permutations of the film throughout the years but then when finally we decided to make it a Canadian-German co-production the timing was great–Rachel was available. But in terms of all the other actors as well it was our first script but I think it was the story probably more than the script that –I don’t like to take credit for things. I suppose that’s encouraging: if you have a good product people will read it and actresses want to play good roles. And there’s such a dearth of good characters, or there were for so long that now suddenly it’s like “of course I want to play this, these are true complex people” … you haven’t played that before. And I think Rachel does a good job of not–you could go over the top–but it’s really the steely determination, that’s one o the reasons we thought she could be great. You can’t really pinpoint her. She’s someone that I think always goes for something different which is great and getting Vanessa–she’s amazing.
CC: Sex trafficking seems to be a hot topic lately. It was even the subject of another SIFF drama As If I’m not there. What did you hope audiences would take a away from your film?
LK: It’s still going on today if you look at the Congo, Liberia, the Middle East, Afghanistan especially–so yeah it’s not over. I think what’s cool about when I talk to people is they really don’t know how it’s going to end … so I guess the issue is that you want people to walk out and go “what did I just see?” and “what are we going to do about it?”. They’re totally different films but I think what Philadelphia did for AIDs by humanizing it and for the gay community people going “oh well he’s a nice man you know Tom Hanks” and suddenly if Tom Hanks can be gay and have AIDs maybe that’s something we can talk about… But he was so amazing in that film that you relate to it and I remember specifically a lot of people that would be homophobic went to see it and minds got changed. I think that’s the same thing here where you think sex trafficking is something that happens on a TV show like a Law and Order episode …it’s such a more relevant issue than we think. And there’s the issue of sex trafficking but there’s also the issue of large organizations with no accountability. Look at the banking system. I think it’s a microcosm for a lot and we knew that. You should see one of the early drafts it was like 900 pages that just didn’t end and people were like “focus, focus, focus” on the story of this one woman. I’m excited to see what happens in August and I hope it gets received well and not just as a film. That was I guess the point: make a good movie that then gets people talking as opposed to talking at people for two hours .
CC: It really makes you wonder about the effectiveness of U.N. peacekeepers especially when they’re outsourced. That could be a whole other movie.
LK: What’s interesting is people always say “how’d you find the story?”, and I’m like “it’s called the internet” . We haven’t really said anything that isn’t readily available for you but I think that’s what’s fascinating. I love when you see a movie even just Social Network or something, you wanna read the book you want to read the article, you want to go home and read everything, and I think there’s a lot to learn here.
CC: Are you working on any new films?
LK: We have a couple of things going they’re a little different in tone. One’s an adaptation of a book called “Burning Rainbow Farm” by Dean Kuipers. It’s an amazing book about these two dudes in love– they weren’t gay–but they had a farm in Michigan and the government tried to take it away from them because they had some dope on it. Really a kind of Thelma and Louise tone, great characters and a kind of sense of ownership of land—a very kind of iconic Butch Cassidy type of film. Then the other one is about a group of dentists and doctors that smuggled art out of the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. They were dentists for the Canadian national hockey team so they were smuggling during the Canada and Soviet big hockey summits sort of like Ocean’s Eleven meets The Lives of Others. It’s fun.
CC: So you’re attracted to true stories. Have you written any purely fictional scripts?
LK: Oh yeah I have done that too. I have a good one about a spelling bee. It’s a coming of age comedy . I guess I get so impatient about shooting films. So if there’s something great out there I’m ready to go. I like being towards the end of a script and getting ready to shoot more than sitting at home and writing… maybe I just don’t have enough of an imagination [laughs].
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