Ghosts

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.

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.

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.

The dreadful plight of illegal immigrants to the U.K. has been highlighted in a number of films, including Michael Winterbottom's 'In This World' and Channel 4's miniseries 'Sex Traffic'. While Nick Broomfield was motivated by the tragedy of the deaths of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecombe Bay to abandon his normal style (of self-led investigative documentary) to film a dramatic reconstruction of their story. He handles the transition in styles well, and his film is realistic, harrowing and marked by striking photography of Britain's ugly-beautiful underbelly. Particularly good is the portrayal of the gang-master, a villain, yet also a victim at the same time. If there's a criticism its that, judged purely as drama, the story is almost too harrowing, with no hope of redemption at the end. But of course, the events depicted actually happened and, with the exception of the final chapter, continue to happen: this is an important film, and one that asks awkward questions for those of us rich off the backs of migrant labour.

i saw this very recently and i implore everyone to see it.

this film is brilliant in it's illustration of the lives of people forced to take desperate measures.

the need for money being at the heart of the story, and money having no heart being part of the problem.

one question it raises is responsibility, and you can't help but think governments across the world must change the

economic and subsequent social situations that require these pyramids of suffering to occur.

i particularly enjoyed the depiction of English racists, very life-like disgusting ignorant and often ugly.

the greed greasing the wheels of exploitation on every level was thought provoking.

in all an absolute masterpiece