Director
Violeta Ayala
Development support
Three Norwegian girls are caught in Bolivia with 22kg of cocaine in their luggage, triggering a media storm that will shape the rest of their lives.
Long Synopsis
Flying out of Bolivia’s cocaine capital, three Norwegian girls are caught with 7kg of cocaine in each of their bags. As soon as word got out, Norwegian journalists descended on the Bolivian city creating the biggest media storm for a drug bust in Norway, changing the outcome of the case forever. Stina and Christina were portrayed as two naive European girls while Madelaine fitted the stereotype of ‘the Latin’ trafficker. Three years later, Stina becomes a celebrity, Christina is found innocent in a Norwegian court and Madelaine remains behind bars in Bolivia. How can one girl be found innocent and the other two guilty? Why should you believe one girl over the other? What role does the media playing in the predicament of each girl?
THE BOLIVIAN CASE is a character driven film about two of the world’s biggest businesses: the media and drug trafficking. Following the stranger than fiction stories of the three Norwegian girls, the film will take the audience from a jail in one of the world’s poorest countries, to a court in the world’s richest, giving an insight into the power mainstream media has in shaping justice.
A portrait that looks into society’s moral dilemma, questioning the disparity in the consequences for three girls who were caught committing the same crime.