Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

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.

This is not so much a film more a docudrama. Nick Broomfield chooses to tell the story through the experience of one girl. Whilst it is certainly shocking to see innocent people manipulated by heartless people-traffickers and exploited (in this case by British Chinese as well as British Caucasians), I couldn't help but feel that I was being 'hectored' by the director.Strangely, in spite of the awful outcome of this sorry episode, I felt little compassion for the central character. This was in part due to the lack-lustre acting by the ensemble cast. Much of the film had the feel of improvisation about it. And there was so much repetition - endless shots of our illegals being driven in a mini van to yet another low-pay employment opportunity. The pace of this piece is funereal.What really irked me though were the end captions. Nick Broomfield informs us that most illegal Chinese immigrants never make it back to their homeland. Fair comment. But then he declares that the British government have refused to pay off the debts of the Chinese cockle-pickers that survived this tragedy. Does he really expect the government (of whatever colour) to pick up the tab for debts incurred in other countries by people who are working here in the black economy? I think the story of the Chinese cockle-pickers is a story worth telling. It's a pity this film didn't do a better job of it.

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.

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