James Hitchcock
Britain has a large Chinese community, according to the latest estimates over 250,000 strong, and possibly nearly double that figure. For various reasons, however, they tend to have a lower profile among white Britons than do other ethnic minorities such as the South Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities, and films about them are rare, "Sour Sweet" being an exception. "Ghosts" takes a look at those with the lowest profile of all, the illegal Chinese immigrants who, in recent years, have been arriving in Britain to take low-paid jobs in a number of industries. As others have pointed out, the title has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is a derogatory Chinese term for white people. On the other, it refers to the immigrant workers themselves, who are "ghosts" in the sense that they are almost invisible, unnoticed by British officialdom and largely ignored by the wider British society.The film is based upon a real-life tragedy which occurred in Morecambe Bay in February 2004, when 23 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned after being caught by the tide. (Morecambe Bay is an estuary in Lancashire which is notable both for the large amount of sand and mudflats which are exposed at low tide and for the speed with which the rising tide can come in). It follows the fortunes of Ai Qin (pronounced Ai Chin), a divorced young mother who travels to Britain in the hope of making a better life and of earning more money with which to support her young son.Today's People's Republic of China tends to get a good press both from leftists with sentimental memories of the Mao Tse-Tung poster on the wall of their student bedsit and from rightists who approve of its commitment to free enterprise, but it can also be seen as a state which incorporates both the worst of Communism and the worst of capitalism, a combination of an oppressive one-party dictatorship and an economic system which permits the ruthless exploitation of the working class. It is this downside of the Chinese economic "miracle" which we see in the film. Like many people in the poverty-stricken, rural province of Fujian (Fukien), Ai Qin sees conditions in China as being so hopeless that illegal immigration to the West is the only answer. She agrees to pay a "snakehead" $25,000 to smuggle her into Britain; this, of course, is an impossible sum for a poor Chinese villager to find, so she enters into an agreement whereby she will pay him a deposit and then pay the balance gradually out of her wages in Britain.After a long journey across Asia and Europe, Ai Qin arrives in Britain. She is taken on by a Chinese gangmaster who hires out migrant labour to farms and food-processing factories in and around Thetford, in the Breckland area of Norfolk. She is forced to share a small house with eleven other illegal immigrants and to pay £25 a week out of her meagre wages for the privilege. The Chinese migrants are resented by the local people, and after the house is wrecked by vandals and the police start to take an interest in his activities, the gangmaster decides to shift his operations to Lancashire, where he has heard that good money can be made from cockle-picking.The subject of immigration is currently a controversial one in Britain, and the film concentrates more on the personal experience of the immigrants themselves than on the political debate. We see a few British characters, such as Robert, Ai Qin's unpleasant landlord in Thetford or the corrupt official at the employment agency, accepting bribes to ignore the fact that the migrants are working illegally, but for the most part the native English population are a vague, ghostly, threatening presence. Some have seen the film as an indictment of racist attitudes, but it is by no means certain that the Norfolk farm-workers or Lancashire cockle-pickers are motivated by racism, if by that term is meant a white supremacist ideology or a belief in the superiority of one race over another. The Breckland, an agricultural district with poor sandy soils and low rainfall, and Morecambe, a seaside resort suffering from the decline of the British holiday industry, are both economically depressed areas, and the local people see the influx of low-paid immigrant labour- with justification- as a threat to their livelihoods.This is the second film about illegal immigration to be shown on British television in recent weeks, the first being Stephen Frears's "Dirty Pretty Things". The two films, despite their similar subject-matter, are different in style. Frears used the twilight world of illegal migrants as the backdrop to a traditional thriller. Nick Broomfield's film, a fictionalised retelling of real events made using amateur actors and no scripted dialogue, is closer in style to a "fly-on-the-wall" documentary. Of the two films I would, marginally, prefer Frears's, which has a more gripping plot- Broomfield makes the mistake of giving away the ending to his film right at the beginning, by starting with a film showing the cockle-pickers trapped by the tide. Nevertheless, "Ghosts" has much to recommend it. Ai Qin Lin gives a wonderfully natural and unaffected performance as the heroine, and the film gives us a good insight into the problems faced by migrant labourers, problems to which there are no easy answers. 7/10.
davideo-2
STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning When 23 illegal Chinese cockle pickers drowned on the shores of Morcombe Bay in 2004, it exposed a dark, organized criminal underworld that most of us are probably vaguely aware of but blissfully turn a blind eye to. A secret, controlled network between organized gangs here and in places like China. This film follows the story of real life illegal Ai Qin, who travels to Britain from China in a sealed box in the back of a lorry in order to provide a better life for her son. But when she arrives in the UK, the only thing she finds waiting is domineering slave masters, disgusting living conditions and awful jobs with low pay. It all carries on with no solution until the night of the ill-fated MB disaster, which she was one of the few lucky enough to survive.Nick Broomfield, of Kurt and Courtney fame, has gone to pain-staking lengths to dramatize an imagined drama of what likely happened on the night of the Morcambe Bay cockle-picking disaster, staging a painfully authentic and believable tale that pulls no punches and tells it exactly like it is. All the cast, headed by real life immigrant Qin, pull off honest and earthly performances in a depressing and hopeless tale with some surprising little dashes of humour here and there that perk things up a bit. The only bum note is the unfairly sympathetic tone Broomfield chooses to accompany his film, tugging at our heart strings with the information of the immigrants spending six months on their journey to the UK mostly concealed in boxes, how most of them will never see their families again, how the British government still refuses to help the families back in China and how awful it all is. Poverty must be an awful thing, but these people did come over to our country unlawfully, taking jobs with forged documents that belonged to unemployed British people, and must have had some idea of the risks involved. To try and imply that our government should help when they were offered no protection or right to work here in the first place does seem a bit over the top to me. It is a very tragic tale all round, though, and one Broomfield, and his cast made up of other illegal immigrants (performance or re-enactment?) have brought to life quite powerfully. ****
itsacharliebrownchristma
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.
