jjvmadden This DVD had been resting on my shelf for some months - I kept putting off viewing it because I feared it would be a depressing watch. On the contrary, I found it to be hugely involving and, at times, extremely funny. It is incredibly moving (you will have to have a pretty hard heart not to cry at some scenes) but the eye-opening and potentially 'worthy' message is communicated with a humanity that is motivating and positive rather than simply depressing.Nick Broomfield tells the story with subtle skill. The illusion of documentary reality is almost perfect but this does not distance the viewer from the characters - we enter into their thoughts and feelings partly through the excellent and subtle use of music and partly from utterly convincing performances.

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.

Jo Roach A shaming portrayal of the way the UK benefits from cheap labour of illegal immigrants. The format is feature film, rather than fly on the wall documentary that audiences are used to, from Nick Broomfield.It's superbly done and Broomfield has made it easy on the viewer with a very straightforward blow-by-blow account. The camera seems to go right to the heart of the lives of these unfortunate people, without being overly sentimental.It's an arresting film, very beautifully composed and with a soundtrack that only assists in forcing you to quietly question why this happened.It would do little Britain some good if this film was part of the national curriculum, in 'our' schools.

paul2001sw-1 The dreadful plight of illegal immigrants to the U.K. has been highlighted in a number of films, including Michael Winterbottom's 'In This World' and Channel 4's miniseries 'Sex Traffic'. While Nick Broomfield was motivated by the tragedy of the deaths of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecombe Bay to abandon his normal style (of self-led investigative documentary) to film a dramatic reconstruction of their story. He handles the transition in styles well, and his film is realistic, harrowing and marked by striking photography of Britain's ugly-beautiful underbelly. Particularly good is the portrayal of the gang-master, a villain, yet also a victim at the same time. If there's a criticism its that, judged purely as drama, the story is almost too harrowing, with no hope of redemption at the end. But of course, the events depicted actually happened and, with the exception of the final chapter, continue to happen: this is an important film, and one that asks awkward questions for those of us rich off the backs of migrant labour.