Ghosts Details

Making a drama out of a crisis

There is a small band of British filmmakers (Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Michael Winterbottom) who you can always rely on to produce edgy, relevant and inventive cinema. Nick Broomfield is in this group. Just when it looked like his usual style (of following around, trying and often spectacularly failing to get close to his subjects) was wearing thin, Broomfield has pulled a rabbit out of the hat with this potent dramatisation of the drowning of 23 illegal Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004. The style is low-key, using real locations and a non-professional cast, many of whom were illegal immigrants themselves. Lead actress Ai Qin Lin gives the sort of raw performance that a million acting lessons can’t buy. Ghosts has some extremely disturbing moments, but Broomfield employs his usual brand of absurdist humour to at least make his film watchable, for example with the bumbling attempts by a gangmaster to bribe an employment agency for work (with boxes of chocolates!) and the moments of humour amongst the workers themselves (during a supermarket visit, finding that vegetables they may have picked are too expensive for them to afford). It may not have gotten the attention of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes The Barley or Michael Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo, but Ghosts might just be better than any of them.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Facts all wrong

To start with I haven't seen the film as I was instantly put off by the desciption, firstly because the location of the event was said to be in the South East. Unless they have moved Morcambe Bay it is situated in Lancashire, in the North West. Secondly I struggle to enjoy a film with subtitles.