I saw this movie at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2007. I didn't expect it to stay with me, but it has. It recreates the experiences of a young Chinese woman who pays a human trafficker to get her into England, where she can earn money to send home. The film tells the story of her six-month journey to England and what her life was like after she arrived there, which is, in essence, invisible, undocumented slavery. The title of the film is problematic; many people probably expect a paranormal thriller. But I understand why the filmmaker chose it. Ghosts are beings who live among us but are invisible. Like two parallel universes, two different realities living layered together but separate and invisible.(Spoiler ahead) The film's climax comes the day she and her fellow workers are driven out onto a huge flat beach to dig for cockles. The hours go by, and they keep digging. Finally the water is coming up around their ankles and they must go. But they realize they have no idea which way to go. In all directions, miles of empty sand beaches stretch out as far as the eye can see, and they've lost their bearings. Their van is soon swamped. The woman ends up standing on top of the van with the others in utter darkness, trying to call her mother so she can hear her son's voice one last time. Thankfully, someone got through to some emergency services and they were found and saved, but not before 23 people drowned. The young woman survived. This happened on Feb. 5, 2004.Recently I ran across a reference to Morecambe Bay in Lancashire emphasizing how dangerous it is, and realized this had to be the location from that movie. Indeed, it was. Morecambe Bay lies on Britain's west coast, halfway up the side. It is actually an estuary, the mouth of five major rivers and their peninsulas along with seven islands. It is the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats and sand in the UK, covering 120 square miles. At low tide, you can walk between the islands and far out onto the sands, but the bay is notorious for its quicksand and fast-moving tides. It is said that the tide comes in "as fast as a horse can run." For centuries, there have been royally appointed local guides called "Queen's Guide to the Sands" to take people across safely. The Chinese boss probably did not know this.When I saw this film, I had a hard time understanding how these people could become so lost out on the sands. I'd always imagined the tide coming in like you see in movies. Nice big waves coming from one direction, in toward land – in other words, with a discernible direction. But I know now that in mudflats, the water just seeps in around you. And with 120 miles of sand, there's plenty of ways to lose your bearings. The overall tone of the film reflects that disorientation very well. The action may seem mundane, but the sense of disconnectedness is powerful and memorable. The Chinese woman is helpless, powerless, lost, like being in suspended animation. Time loses all meaning except for your work shift. There is no context, no cushioning reality outside your own. Psychologically, the woman is utterly alone."Ghosts" is an ultra-low-budget film with amateur actors, nearly all the dialogue ad-libbed – there is nothing particularly memorable about the film as such. And yet it comes back to me when I see video of desperate Syrians carrying only a water bottle, telling about loved ones lost in the water in the dark. I remember that Chinese woman, how alone she was, how powerless, how disconnected. Europe is full of people like her, and probably so is the US. When you take them as a group, you see the bigger political picture, the logistics, the impossible problems. But when you take them as individuals, you see a human being who needs help. In that regard, I have to say, eight years after seeing this film, "Ghosts" stays with me.

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.

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.

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