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Ai Qin Lin as 'Ai Qin' in Nick Broomfield's 'Ghosts' |
Disturbing drama from the documentary king
GHOSTS
Directed by Nick Broomfield
Certificate 15
THE sad day came like a bucket of cold North Sea water being poured over the news.
Even the most vitriolic of commentators – the people who normally found it very easy to blame what they perceived as the unpleasant state of the nation on illegal immigration – were silent.
Now, the events at Morecambe Bay in February 2004, when 21 people from China who were shoreline cockle-pickers died have become the subject of this intense and moving drama.
In the same way the cinema of Ken Loach re-stages situations using amateur actors, director Nick Broomfield has cast people who have no experience but are aware of the story. Instead, he suggests situations and then asks them to react.
Coupled with the use of jagged camera work, you get the uncomfortable feeling that you are a peeping tom into other people’s misery.
Above all it is about desperate poverty, of what we will resort to doing in order to find enough for the next meal.
It is a desperately sad indictment of the state of the world in the 21st century.
The story begins by introducing Ai Qin Li, a Chinese national who makes the decision to borrow the price of a ticket to the UK in the hope that wages she plans to earn will be enough not only to live on but to pay off the debt.
She ends up in Thetford – coincidentally the birthplace of 18th-century philosopher Tom Paine, who warned of the perils of slave labour if international trade was not managed to the benefit of all.
She works for a time in a disgusting meat factory before a police raid makes her boss, Mr Li, transfer his ‘staff’ to Morecambe to pick cockles.
But there is tension with local workers, and the Chinese gang believe it safer to go out over night to do a shift – and eventually are stuck on a sandbank with the tide coming in. The rest we know.
It is a disturbing and well made drama. Broomfield uses photographic tricks to enhance the feeling of the individual consumed by forces beyond their control, be it the natural cycle of the tide, cutting shots of the peacefulness of Morecambe Bay with the predicament the pickers find themselves, or the lowly worker battling to make a living out of an uncaring capitalist market.
Broomfield has a feeling for documentary – his portrait of South African racist Eugene Terreblanche stands out – and he has used the tricks of the factual programme maker to brilliantly recreate that dark day when 21 desperate souls were taken by the sea.
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