Nick Broomfield examines the tragic deaths of Chinese cockle-pickers who lost their lives in Morecambe Bay in 2004.
Powerful feature film debut by veteran documentarian Nick Broomfield, 'Ghosts is an unflinching dramatisation (or 'Real Cinema' if you prefer) of events surrounding the deaths of 24 Chinese immigrant workers in England; who drowned in treacherous night-time conditions on Morecambe Bay whilst picking cockles to be sold in some of Britain's leading supermarkets (three of whom are named on screen). 'Ghosts' follows a similar narrative structure to that of Michael Winterbottom's 'In This World' (2005), depicting the immigrant's exploitation in stages: first at the hands of unscrupulous smugglers at home, then by the faceless tyranny of neo-imperial Globalisation and our hemisphere's modern day slave trade in migrant workers. Broomfield, like other neo-realist directors before him, chooses a cast of non-professional actors, many of whom, including 'Ghosts' leading lady; Ai Qin Lin, give affecting performances drawn from their own experiences. 'Ghosts', despite quite a bit of human drama and even some oddball humour, was primarily made to enlighten an audience about what's going on in the world today with regards to labour, and in that respect; this stark and harrowing picture achieves exactly what it set out to do. 'Ghosts' is an important, demanding film, simply told and definitely worth seeing.
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Nick Broomfield-directed dramatisation of the story of 23 Chinese illegal immigrants lost in Morecambe bay in 2004. Ai Quin (Ai Quin Lin), a young Chinese girl from a rural area, pays $25,000 to people smugglers to be brought to the UK in hopes of supporting her family back home. However, rather than a land of milk and honey, she finds the UK offers her only a series of menial, disastrously paid jobs in food preparation for large supermarket chains and a cramped, dingy hovel of a home she must share with eleven others in the same boat. Finally, they're sent to work picking cockles illegally in the dangerous tidal waters of Morecambe bay by night, under brutally grasping gang bosses. By using untrained actors, many of whom are former illegal immigrants themselves, Broomfield lends a chillingly real documentary feel to this portrayal of the inhumanity being meted out on a large fraction of an estimated 3 million illegal workers in the UK today.
Directed by famed documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield (BIGGIE AND TUPAC, KURT AND COURTNEY), GHOST is the dramatisation of the events in which a group of Chinese illegal immigrants were drowned, whilst fish for cockles off the South East coast in February 2004.
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