Before Richard Goldstone stepped down as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in September, he thanked a group of reporters at the Netherlands' Foreign Press Association for their coverage. "If people aren't told what courts are doing," he said, "then 90% of their value is lost."

A new film to be aired this spring on the Cinemax "Reel Life" documentary series is sure to focus attention once again not only on the work of the Tribunal, but also on the role the media have played in the larger Balkans conflict. Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women, by the South African-born New York filmmaker Mandy Jacobson, follows two women - childhood friends Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac - as they describe being raped while prisoners at the infamous Serb-run Omarska Camp in the early days of the Bosnian war, and as they seek political justice. Ultimately, the man Cigelj accuses of rape was indicted in absentia as a war criminal, and this international court, for the first time in history, defined rape as a crime against humanity.

The film also highlights the role journalists played in closing the camps and raises a host of other media issues. In an interview last September, Mandy Jacobson discussed her experiences.

Q: Was it difficult to find people who would speak to you? In the film there's one woman who says, either shoot us, help us, or get out.

A: That, for me, is one of the best clips we were able to get, where a woman said to us: listen, I'm sick of all you journalists and if you don't want to help us, stop filming. If you want to help us, fine. But the boundaries of what "help" meant were really pushed in this war. I've spoken to numerous journalists who have spoken about how their professional roles were really pushed to the boundaries.

My co-director, Karmen Jelincic, who is from Croatia, spent seven months not switching on the camera. I think that was a very important part of the quality of the material we were able to get. We were different from the thousands of journalists that swarmed into Bosnia asking: are there any women here raped and speak English?

I would like to see our audiences make the connection - not "what can we do for poor women in Bosnia?" but rather "How is violence against women going on in our own lives and what is the connection between the culture of violence in peacetime that allows this to happen in wartime?"

Q: Jadranka herself even says in the film that maybe what happened to her is God's revenge for her not noticing the suffering of other women in the past. . . .

A: Isn't that the most chilling thought? When I witnessed what women re suffering in other parts of the world, I took it simply as news. We could do a big critique of the media and the way in which it presents news.

Q: Why do you think rape is being taken more seriously in this war and has become the focus of so much media attention?

A: Well, Maggie O'Kane, a journalist from The Guardian who did a fantastic job in breaking a lot of the stories from Eastern Bosnia about systematic rape, reckons that some of it had to do with the fact that 40 percent of people covering the war were women journalists, "chicks in the zone" she calls them. I don't think she wants to get into too much of women-can-do-a-better-job-than-men on it because look, Roy Gutman [of Newsday] also did a fantastic job of it.

Q: So without the media, the camps may have remained open?

A: Yes. Nusreta says if it wasn't for the journalists, we wouldn't have been saved. The stories also impacted international policy because they've shamed politicians. And I find it fascinating that journalists are even being called to the Tribunal as expert witnesses. I'm sure journalists never thought of their roles like that in previous wars.

Q: Do you think people will care when they see your film?

A: As we try to now get broadcasters interested, I'm getting two extreme responses. In the U.S., I'm getting, "Our audiences don't care about foreign issues." And in Europe I'm getting this new word, "We are Bosnia-ed out." And my reaction to the American viewpoint is that audiences don't care because they're not getting fed interesting stories. Now as far as the Bosnia-ed out syndrome, I'm sure that's actually real. But we can never have enough stories, particularly on the resilience of human nature. I think maybe we're Boia-ed out on victim stories, but of in-depths stories, I don't think we've had enough of them.

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