Canadian Press
March 22, 2006
Milosevic death prompts CTV to advance its Louise Arbour movie to weekend
John Mckay
TORONTO (CP) - The Canadian judge who managed to indict former Yugoslav
president Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes and genocide must be
heartbroken, says the actor who plays her in the CTV movie Hunt For Justice:
The Louise Arbour Story.
"I bet it's so disappointing for her," says Wendy Crewson about Arbour, who
headed the United Nations-created International Criminal Tribunal and who is
now the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.
"After all that work and the fact that justice will not be done is very
upsetting. Dead is not good enough at all. The victims need closure on this,
justice needs to be seen as served, Serbia needs to understand that what
happened is wrong."
Milosevic died last week while imprisoned in The Hague and awaiting trial on
charges he was responsible for the deaths of some quarter-million Bosnians
and Croatians during the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.
While there have been accusations the so-called Butcher of the Balkans was
poisoned, Crewson doesn't believe any of it, arguing that everyone wanted to
see the trial proceed.
The film was shot in Montreal, Holland and Germany in 2004 but has sat on
the CTV shelf for a year while the network awaited an opportune time to air
it. Milosevic's death was that opportunity and now it will be broadcast this
Saturday night.
Crewson, who has played many strong roles in her career (The Sue Rodriguez
Story, The Many Trials of One Jane Doe), says she researched Arbour's
inflections and mannerisms while watching CBC archive tapes. She also met
the former Supreme Court justice who visited the set in The Hague, and
attended two diplomatic screenings last year, one in Ottawa and one at the
U.N.
She says Arbour was pleased with the results. The credits on the TV movie
make it clear Arbour had no involvement in the production, though, and that
although based on a true story, it was fictionalized in places for dramatic
purposes.
The film opens in 1996 and continues through to 1999 where Arbour is seen
cutting through the Gordian knot of diplomatic red tape to get Milosevic and
other suspected war criminals arrested and charged.
Crewson says her strengths were her ability to prioritize on a complex issue
and also her courage. The death threats portrayed in the film really
happened. And everyone was afraid of moving against Milosevic because he was
an active head of state.
"They were afraid of pulling Russia into a larger war if they upset
Milosevic, so NATO didn't want to step in to police this," explains Crewson
who clearly still feels passionate about the issues.
Instead of sitting behind a desk, Arbour ventured into the field, visiting
mass grave sites and meeting the relatives of victims. Crewson says those
scenes, shot in Montreal, were among the most emotionally difficult for her.
Hunt For Justice was helmed by Quebec director Charles Biname (H2O, Rocket)
and features John Corbett, William Hurt, Leslie Hope and Crewson's husband
Michael Murphy.
The film originally ended with a crawl explaining that Milosevic was in
prison in The Hague awaiting completion of his trial, but that now will be
updated to say that on March 11, he was found dead in his cell.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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