Ghosts

This DVD had been resting on my shelf for some months - I kept putting off viewing it because I feared it would be a depressing watch. On the contrary, I found it to be hugely involving and, at times, extremely funny. It is incredibly moving (you will have to have a pretty hard heart not to cry at some scenes) but the eye-opening and potentially 'worthy' message is communicated with a humanity that is motivating and positive rather than simply depressing.

Nick Broomfield tells the story with subtle skill. The illusion of documentary reality is almost perfect but this does not distance the viewer from the characters - we enter into their thoughts and feelings partly through the excellent and subtle use of music and partly from utterly convincing performances.

In February 2004, twenty three illegal Chinese immigrants drowned in Morecambe Bay. This film follows the journey of one immigrant, Ai Qin, who sets out from China to travel to England to make a lot of money to support her young son. The travel is expensive (£25,000) and the journey takes over six months, illegally grossing many borders by hiding in containers or secret compartments. When she arrives in London, Qin finds herself taken north where she joins a crowded squat of other Chinese people and, after purchasing fake papers, gets hard labour jobs with long hours and low wages.

I'll be honest and say that Ghosts sat on my HDD for around about eight months before I finally got to watching it – it just never felt like I was in the mood for it. Tonight I decided to watch it and in a way I still feel a bit like it was something I had to see rather than was glad that I saw. It is not a great film and I think it is worth me saying that out loud. A lot of the very positive reviews I have read have tended to focus on the importance of the topic, the scale of the problem or the human suffering involved. These are not things of Broomfield's creation nor things that the film should be credited for. In tackling these subjects I have no qualms acknowledging that the film is certainly "worthy" but this should not be mistaken for the film being brilliant.

That said, it is a good piece of work that does gain credit for highlighting the subject in a film. The making of is typically Broomfield and is a documentary style without formal script or professional actors. At times this does hurt the film because some scenes are clunky and more than a couple of performances are stiff and unnatural. Fortunately these do not badly affect the film in the main, in particular Ai Qin Lin is very convincing and touching in her turn, and many of the other main players are good. Broomfield doesn't help himself either because not only is the film slightly longer than it can bear, but he does labour his points heavily at times. In one scene we have a clumsy piece of dialogue where one characters asks where the vegetables they are illegally picking will be sent and "Asda, Sainburys, Tesco, supermarkets" is the reply. This is a crass and clumsy way to make a good point – and it does damage the point. Sadly there are several examples like that one, not least of which is the caption that declares the British Government has refused to help pay off the debts the families of the twenty-three still have, as if that is the crux of the problem.

Despite these issues the film is still quite good but, because of them, it is not as great as many would have you believe. However it is an important and worthy film and, for all its flaws I would still recommend you see it or the good it has in its making, message and topic.

A shaming portrayal of the way the UK benefits from cheap labour of illegal immigrants. The format is feature film, rather than fly on the wall documentary that audiences are used to, from Nick Broomfield.

It's superbly done and Broomfield has made it easy on the viewer with a very straightforward blow-by-blow account. The camera seems to go right to the heart of the lives of these unfortunate people, without being overly sentimental.

It's an arresting film, very beautifully composed and with a soundtrack that only assists in forcing you to quietly question why this happened.

It would do little Britain some good if this film was part of the national curriculum, in 'our' schools.

I went to see this movie without really knowing much about it beyond that it was the story of the cockle pickers tragedy, and I left the theatre feeling utterly empty and shocked. It is an incredibly moving piece of work, cast by non-professionals, who I thought did a great job. The movie at times has a documentary feel about it because it is very natural, no special effects of fancy lighting, and the ordinariness of the household and factory scenes convey the grimness of the workers' existence.

The music is very apt as it has an Oriental dreamlike quality about it, which made me think that the workers probably spend their humdrum lives daydreaming about being back in China with their families.

It was a depressing movie for me as it casts us British people in a bad, but not unrealistic, light, and here we see some parts of British culture that most of us feel uncomfortable with - we love getting cheap supermarket food but don't really want to know how it gets to our shelves.

I really recommend this movie to everyone, but warn you that it is a very powerful, affecting movie that will stay with you for the rest of the day. I almost felt like crying at the end, and it has been a long time since a movie made me do that. In fact, I felt so upset when I left the theatre that I made myself go to see another movie just one hour later to clear my head (that movie being the truly awful 'Epic movie').

This movie will make you feel bad and good all at the same time, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The title of Nick Broomfield's new film is deliberately ambiguous; ghosts being the disparaging term the Chinese use to describe white westerners and (possibly) a reference to the invisibility of poorly paid, unprotected non-British workers who work in slave conditions in the food industry.

Three years ago such workers made the news, briefly, when 23 illegal Chinese immigrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while digging for cockles late one evening. As the waters rose around them, they rang their families to say goodbye, unaware they'd have been better off ringing 999.

Their deaths inspired the notorious Broomfield to make a film in which he re-enacts the events leading up to the disaster. In this he is assisted by a cast of amateurs, many of whom are themselves illegal immigrants, and the film's star Ai Qi Lin, a non-professional, whom we follow through various low-skilled jobs in the food industry in a bid to pay back the $25,000 she borrowed from 'Snakeheads' to smuggle her into the country.

There are times when she must wonder why she bothered, forced as she is to live in a two-bedroom house with 11 other Chinese immigrants, all of whom are sworn at and spat on by their neighbours. The landlord is no better: he overcharges them.

And yet, for all that., despite the horrific ending, Ghosts isn't entirely bereft of hope. After all, if nothing else, its impact is such that it should force us all to question our own appetite for cheap food and embarrass supermarkets into altering the way their products are produced.