Thanks, yeah. It was a good morning.

What impact do you think the nominations will have on the film?

I think any recognition is good, especially in Canada. The film’s about to be released on DVD, so I’m hoping people will keep seeing it.

Your film deals with human trafficking and sexual enslavement. Are these difficult topics to discuss?

I don’t think people want to talk about it too much, that’s for sure. But I think once you get people talking about it it’s hard to ignore. Look, to be fair this has been happening for decades in Asia, Africa and South America, but suddenly you have white girls, Eastern European white girls, that can be put on a poster and it’s being talked about now. Like the phrase ‘sex trafficking’. When I first started researching this in early 2003, it wasn’t used on every episode of 24 and it wasn’t a standard term, even though this has been happening for decades. So I think people are talking about it more. It’s unfortunate that racism played a role in keeping it biased for so long, but I’m hoping that this brings attention.

You’ve told several interviewers that the movie doesn’t even begin to show the horrors experienced by these women. How did you choose what to show?

You know ultimately you have to create a compelling story that flows. Also you need to understand why those girls don’t trust the police, why they don’t trust Kathy in the first place, and what the UN does to them. I wanted a scene that encompasses a lot of that. [That’s why we showed] the photos [of tortured girls] in the bar. Because there’s such a psychology behind the crime, and the idea that you could take a girl off the street and make her perform as a somewhat affable sex worker just makes no sense. What goes into that is really several desensitization times, as the NGOs would call it, where these girls are repeatedly tortured: raped, burned in very strategic places—behind the ear, under the feet—until they’re literally broken down. And then they’re given this token of hope which is ‘Well, if you perform your duties or earn enough money then you can buy back your life’.

There’s a ten-part miniseries in this, but I think ultimately what I wanted to show was that it is a non-sexualized breaking down. I think people think ‘Oh, maybe a girl can put up with this a little, she knows what she’s getting into’ and I wanted to show that these girls are treated like a commodity.

In the DVD commentary, former UN human rights official Madeleine Rees said that every one of these stories happened. What kind of research did you do to get the girls’ stories?

Eilis [Kirwan]wrote it with me. She’s Irish, so we were based out of Dublin, and at the time it was really cheap to fly around Europe, so we spent two years there. Kathy was in Amsterdam and we would visit her. We also took a big six month trip all across Eastern Europe and spoke to high level people in the UN, OSCE, Human Rights Watch, and all those organizations supposedly protesting and helping, and then we spoke to underground shelters, NGOS. We did the whole eastern European loop over six months.

You say you met with organizations that were ‘supposedly’ helping?

You know the character that Monica Belluci plays? I think what happened is that suddenly in the late 90s or early 2000s sex trafficking as an epidemic became extremely, for lack of a better term, sexy. It became one of the ‘in’ causes to be fighting and suddenly you had all these NGOs that had nothing to do with sex trafficking, but maybe did migration. Sometimes they had nothing to do with women’s rights, but they could put together the best proposals. And [the Belluci role] is based on a group called the IOM [International Organization for Migration], which really became the forefront of the anti-trafficking fight. For example, they got $6000 from the US government per girl that they repatriated. The girl would get a plane ticket home—most of the time she didn’t want to go home, because it was someone that she knew that got her there in the first place—but she would get a plane ticket home, two weeks’ rehabilitation and $250 as a stipend. That’s collectively maybe a $1000 dollars and then [the IOM] would pocket five grand.

And there was no support for the women after that?

No. And worse, if a girl said, ‘I don’t want to go home’, then they would either give her back to the police or drop her off in the forest on the other side of the border. Then she’s in Serbia, so they can say ‘Well, we removed one trafficking victim from Bosnia’. In a weird way it was probably one of the most disgusting things I learned about. It was a very corrupt system. And that NGO took away a lot of the funding for small, underground NGOs that were really dealing with the problems for years.

Among other outrages, one of things that really angered me at the end of the film was learning that none of the security personnel sent home for their involvement in sex trafficking were prosecuted.

No. Only six were sent home and most of them went back to work in different missions.

That’s terrible. Is there anything regular people can do to help?

I suppose it would be asking your government ‘Why can’t we prosecute people?’ International immunity was there to protect people from functional danger, meaning where they’re in a country where let’s say, spitting on the street would result in having your arm chopped off. That’s when you’re unaware of the laws. But if these are laws that are prosecutable in your home country, then they should be when you’re abroad, and there were Canadians involved.

Don’t we have extraterritorial laws for pedophiles?

Exactly. For pedophiles, yes. But not when they’re serving in the UN.

With all that in mind, are you hopeful for the future?

Yeah. I think you have to be. You can’t give up. This is a little film, and we got a lot of people to help us make it, and it’s sort of the little film that could. It got way more attention than we thought and I’m happy for people to use it to let it be the start of a discussion. I am hopeful. I think you have to be hopeful, and I just hope that people continue talking about it and not go ‘Oh, that was hard to watch.’

The Whistleblower is available on DVD January 24.