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Ghosts

United Kingdom 2006 | 96 mins | 35mm | Mandarin w/E.S.

In February 2004, twenty-three illegal Chinese workers drowned when they were surprised by an incoming tide at England’s Morecambe Bay. How this tragedy, which shook Britons into awareness of migrant labor conditions, could happen is the subject of documentarian Nick Broomfield’s devastating latest work, a rare venture into fiction.

Broomfield, notorious for inserting himself into sensational films about celebrities (KURT AND COURTNEY; BIGGIE AND TUPAC), here takes a completely different approach. He has nonprofessional Chinese actors, former illegal immigrants themselves and hardly different from the drowning victims, enact a thoroughly researched but lightly fictionalized account of events leading up to the tragedy. Ai Qin Lin, in an astonishing performance, plays an attractive young single mother from rural Fujian who is financially desperate enough to leave her child behind and embark on a grueling six-month overland trek to England. Living in a single room with a half-dozen others and with a racist thug for a landlord, she works a series of dehumanizing jobs with a forged work permit. “Ghosts” refers to the mostly white players in the illegal-employment racket, which involves competing laborers and profiteers as well as the ordinary consumers who unwittingly depend on the cheap labor of these behind-the-scenes workers.

Based on a series of articles by undercover journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai in the Guardian, and boasting a radiant, determined performance by Ai Qin, GHOSTS is indeed “a note of solidarity with the dispossessed” (Variety).

—Frako Loden