Ghosts

In miserable February weather, a group of Chinese workers heads out over the sands of Morecambe Bay. There’s a misjudgment and, as the waters rise, 23 of the cockle-pickers are drowned (Source: O’Neill et al 2007, p.77).

[This] disaster … momentarily lifted the lid on the invisible immigrant workforce who toil for a pittance in the factories, warehouses and mudflats of England (Source: Brookes 2006 np link).

Taking a shameful 2004 tragedy as his starting point, documentary maker Nick Broomfield turns to naturalistic drama (Source: O’Neill et al 2007, p.77).

The Chinese call Europeans ‘ghosts’, Broomfield explains, ‘not only because of our light complexions, but because of their lack of emotional involvement with us’ (Source: Horne 2007, p.18).

[It also] refers [to] the unseen part of the black economy and to the spirits who departed this world on a wet Lancashire night (Source: Mackie 2007, np link).

Rather than showing us the migrant as Other, it shifts our perspective to the world as seen by the Other, and presents us with the possibility of an estrangement which is dependent on the familiarity of the world it presents (Source: Martin 2019, p.252-3).

[The film] tells its story from the point of view of single mother Ai Qin (Ai Qin Lin) (Source: O’Sullivan 2007 np link).

[Its] voyeuristic style helps evoke a sense of empathy from the viewer, as emotions for ‘Ai Qin’ develop over her journey (Source: Mathew 2014, p.21).

The film opens in silence and the sense of a vast space of land and seascape bleached of objects and light. The human figures are diminished by the sheer scale of the framing. This is a metaphor that runs throughout the film, of people being humiliated, reduced in scale (Source: Bromley 2012 p.347).

[A] group of cocklers set off for Morecambe Bay … (Source: Tsui 2007 p.2).

… on the beach … the tide spreads its fingers inwards and night descends. Frozen to the bone in cheap oilskins, the cockle pickers climb on the roof of their minibus to call for help … (Source: Rowat 2007 p.17).

… surrounded by heaving tides. … (Source: Tsui 2007 p.2).

… like a deathly wreath … (Source: Kermode 2007 p.20).

[T]he workers [are] standing, lashed by waves, on top of their van. ‘Call your family before you get into the water,’ one man instruct[s] (Source: Teeman 2007 p.23).

Ai Qin (… played by former illegal immigrant [Ai Qin] Lin …), rings home to sing a last lullaby to her toddler son – but not before she asks her mother whether she’s paid the money lenders who provided her with cash for her trip to England (Source: Tsui 2007 p.2).

It is a terrifying scene, conveying as the printed word never could the horror of that day (Source: Rowat 2007 p.17).

[E]veryone knows how the story is going to end. But before it does, the film flashes back to tell how one of the cockle-pickers came to be there (Source: Kinnes 2007 np).

Suddenly it was a year earlier: Fujian province in Southern China (Source: Teeman 2007 p.23).

[Here Ai Qin] is shown negotiating her environs in a confident manner: taking her son to school on a bicycle, working in the fields and having dinner with her family. In the cycling scene, the camera zooms out from a close-up of Ai Qin to include her son and then, in a long shot, the surrounding town … . The use of long and medium-long shots ensures that Ai Qin is framed not as an individual but as part of a community, and the way she freely moves in and out of the frame signals her ability to act of her own accord. While this signals how much she is ‘at home’ in this context, she feels unable to stay because her earnings from working the field are insufficient to support herself and her child. Ai Qin ‘calculates’ her future on the basis of misleading information provided by a snakehead, who charges her $25,000 – $5,000 up front and the rest as a loan – to take her to Britain (Source: Pereen 2014, p.56).

[He] shows her a picture of a supposed migrant to Britain standing in front of a smart car (Source: Teeman 2007 p.23).

The gangsters who organise her illegal entry into the country insist she will soon be earning enough to pay it off (Source: O’Sullivan 2007 np link).

It is like the worst kind of mortgage: she has paid to make herself an impoverished illegal immigrant with a financial millstone around her neck (Source: Kinnes 2007 np).

After paying [that] extortionate fee to a people smuggler, she gets in a van (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

She [leaves] her baby son with her parents (Source: O’Sullivan 2007 np link).

[W]hen, being driven away from her family in a crowded beat-up van, she tries desperately to open its dirty window to take one more look at her son. But the window will not open; she can barely see through it and the dirt also distorts her own reflection. The camera now frames her in extreme close-up, enclosing her face in its frame … Although there are other people in the van, the camera only shows Ai Qin staring out of the window at the landscape racing by. Her inability to get a clear view of the world and herself signifies a loss of agency: instead of moving of her own accord through a fairly open space in which she felt a sense of belonging, she is now conveyed through spaces separate from her yet also confining her (Source: Pereen 2014, p.56).

[T]he film tracks her six-month journey to England in the time-honoured form of a red line snaking across the map … (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

… in the style of 1940s B movies, … a device recreated by Spielberg in the films Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). This is a way of signalling travel-as-an-exciting-foreign-adventure, which in Ghosts it is, but not in quite the same benign way as presented by Spielberg (Source: Brass 2007, p.347-8).

By superimposing the image of a map highlighting her route onto scenes of being driven through China, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, walking across the Russia– Ukrainian border, being transferred to a truck in Belgrade, and being locked in a small, suffocating secret compartment inside a lorry in Calais for the passage to Dover, a parallel with travelogues is evoked only to be dismissed … . Ai Qin has not planned the route nor does she have any control over where she is taken: rather than traveling, she is transported, like a package (Source: Pereen 2014, p.54).

The film [then shows] … the exploitation and humiliation she endures in an alien environment (Source: Tsui 2007 p.2).

Ai Qin’s ordeal is only starting: the moment she arrives in London, Chinese hoods tell her to phone home and get her outstanding debt paid, or else. This story of migrant suffering could have been told at any time in the past century, if not for the poignant role played by mobile phones: Ai Qin’s occasional calls home only emphasise the isolation of her exile. She promptly falls into the hands of loutish gang-master Mr Lin (Zhan Yu), who puts her up in an overcrowded … (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

… two-bedroom suburban house … (Source: Broomfield nda np link).

… in a dreary Suffolk suburb … (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

… with eleven other Chinese [migrants] (Source: Broomfield nda np link).

[Ghosts] shows a new, alien, exotically grim England – the England that the illegals see. [Here, she] awakes in her overcrowded, rented, two-bed house in a gaunt housing estate to look on to a cheerless landscape into which globalisation has transplanted the chill of world poverty. Broomfield avoids the metropolitan cliches of neon-lit Chinatown with its seedy glamour and takes us instead to Thetford in Norfolk and then to Morecambe, places the English complacently assume to be homes of provincial decency. Instead, they look like new centres of hypocrisy, brutality and racism (Source: Bradshaw 2007 p.7).

Ai Qin’s growing spatial confinement and her impeded vision – her inability to create a visual connection to the world around her and to her own image, which would allow her to reinvent herself – is [shown in] shots [of] her washing her face in front of a steamed-up mirror in the shared bathroom, and staring out of an upstairs window, writing her son’s name (curiously, in English) in the steam created by her own breath because the vista offers no ‘place’ for her (Source: Pereen 2014, p.58).

With an illegally forged work permit … (Source: Broomfield nda np link).

… she is put to work on a farm, picking spring onions, or in a factory, processing supermarket chickens … (Source: Kinnes 2007 np).

… working in a duck-packing plant … and resisting working in ‘massage parlours’ … (Source: Ramaswamy 2006 p.3).

… paying off her debt one miserable chicken wing at a time (Source: Kinnes 2007 np).

And yet there were also moments of humour, mostly involving the buffoonish Mr Lin and his snobbish girlfriend …. (Source: Whitelaw 2007, p.50).

… [and also] a day apple-picking where Al Qin discovered the taste of sugary tea; the cheerful singing of ballads in the back of the van (Source: Teeman 2007, p.23).

[And t]here’s an idyllic moment [when,] after long, ghastly shifts in a meat factory supplying supermarkets, [they are] hired by a ruddy-cheeked farmer’s wife and driven to a lovely old farmhouse, then pick apples in a sun-flecked orchard. This garden of England is, however, doomed. The trees, once stripped, are bulldozed and burnt. It becomes like the rest of our green and pleasant land in this shaming picture – grey, wet and ugly, ruled by the quick quid and no questions asked (Source: Horne 2007 p.18).

What little she earns is heavily skimmed: both by the enforcers (who charge for rent and travel) and by the local employment agency (who demand taxes and bribes) (Source: Brooks 2006, np link).

The workers are routinely deceived, defrauded and misled by all those they encounter: personnel in labour exchanges have to be bribed in order to provide information about employment; the labour contractor cheats them, holding back large portions of his workers’ pay; and the landlord is interested only in how many rent-paying immigrants he can cram into his house. Along with the other labourers in the gang, Ai Qin works 14-hour shifts for a weekly payment of only £100, it being claimed that 44% of her wage held back is deducted ‘for tax’. When she complains, the gangmaster shouts back at her that ‘you are nothing, an illegal’ (Source: Brass 2007, p.347).

And what a dismal life it is. Rather than grand traumas, we witness a gradual attrition of the spirit. Ai Qin and her fellow workers do the unpleasant tasks and antisocial hours that most other workers refuse to do (Source: Ide 2007 p.17).

Contingent events simply befall Ai Qin, over which she has no control – though she’s not passive, she’s forced to survive her circumstances, but unable to change them. The nearest the film gets to a dramatic character is Mr Lin, a sleazy boor who offers Ai Qin a massage parlour job in exchange for favours. Yet even he emerges as a semi-sympathetic victim himself, leaned on in turn by a hulking English gangster. In one of the film’s few moments of light relief …, Lin smilingly raises a glass to his oppressor, and the subtitle reads, ‘Up yours baldy, I hope you choke’ (Source: Romney 2007 p.8).

[In another scene] after being spat at by a neighbour [Mr Lin] remarks, ‘[i]f we were in China, I’d beat him to death, but he’s the type to call the police’ (Source: Martin 2019, p.256).

[T]he film points the finger at the powerful corporations constantly driving down the cost of food production. In Ghosts, the culprits are the supermarket chains – Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco – are named (Source: Ide 2007 p.17).

At first, Ai Qin works back-breakingly hard picking spring onions: her master informs her curtly these wares are for Sainsbury, Asda and Tesco – the unfamiliar names invoked like those of the sternest local chieftains (Source: Bradshaw 2007, np link).

[In a scene where she picks spring onions – Ai Qin:] Mr Lin. Where do they send these spring onions? [Mr Lin:] Asda. Sainsbury’s. Tesco. Supermarkets.(Source: Broomfield 2006, np).

[During] one visit to a major supermarket, … Ai Qin happens across the spring onions we’ve seen her picking in the preceding scene (Source: McCahill 2007 p.19).

[Here, she] has the mortifying experience of … realising that she cannot afford a bunch of the spring onions that she had just that morning held in her hands, as plentiful as weeds (Source: Bradshaw 2007, np link)

[Ai Qin is shopping with a co-worker in a Tesco supermarket:] Look, spring onions. [She picks them up] Maybe I picked these ones myself. Wow. 58p. They’re so expensive. What a rip-off. [Co-worker:] We wrapped those onions but can’t even afford them (Source: Broomfield 2006, np).

[Later], tipped off by hostile neighbours, the police raid the house … (Source: O’Sullivan 2007 np link).

… after which neighbours break into the house, daubing the wall with racist graffiti and emptying their rubbish bins over the kitchen floor (Source: Brass 2007, p.347).

Struggling to raise money to pay off her debt, Ai Qin is finally given a choice. She can either take a job in a London massage parlour or go off for a spot of cockling. Without the benefit of hindsight, it seems an easy choice to make (Source: Brooks 2006, np link).

[Y]ou can’t help wincing when [the] travellers see a rainbow over Morecambe as a good omen for their future (Source: Mackie 2007, np link).

In the climactic scenes … the sea and sky were differentiated by the slimmest paper cut of a horizon (Source: Teeman 2007, p.23).

[So] Ai-Qin … ends up on the quicksands of Morecambe Bay, working at night to avoid local cocklers, desperate to make more money to send home to her son (Source: Ramaswamy 2006 p.3).

… the reason the Chinese venture onto the perilous sands at night is because they are driven off the main cockling patch by rival local workers, bellowing at them from their beach buggies (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

… the locals, understandably annoyed by the illegal intrusion, have beaten them up and stolen their cockles when they worked by day (Source: Mackie 2007, np link).

Broomfield begins and ends his movie on the Morecambe beach: not a haven for holidaymakers, but a huge, empty, cruel space which looks like something from the end of the universe. It seems like Ai Qin and her wretched friends have been finally washed up on some vast shore in a netherworld of undreamt-of callousness and indifference (Source: Bradshaw 2007, np link).

[T]he final scenes, shot in almost pitch-blackness, in which most of the cocklers perished beneath the churning tides, [are] suitably horrific (Source: Whitelaw 2007, p.50).

Nothing, not even our prior knowledge, mitigates the awfulness of the film’s ending. I won’t easily forget the shot of Ai Qin, Atlantic waves about to engulf the van on whose roof she is perched, making a final call to her son … (Source: Sandhu 2007 p.29 link).

… the crash of waves pierced by the screams of people helplessly drowning far from home (Source: Solomons 2007 p.62).

The waters rose as if in a horror film. Al Qin was lucky and – intriguingly against the bleak spirit of the movie -was winched to safety and reunited with her family (Source: Teeman 2007 p.23).

The ‘ghosts’ of the title refers to how Chinese refer to the Anglo-Saxons, but the word is more comparable to the illegals themselves, dead in spirit, drifting unacknowledged through the UK’s service industry (Source: Bradshaw 2007, np link).

Having shown how most of the 23 dead had incurred huge debts to pay people smugglers or snakeheads for passage to the United Kingdom, the film closes with text screens that inform us those debts have now reverted to the victims’ families in China and then provide details of a website – www.ghosts.uk.com – where viewers can make a donation to help pay off the money still owed to snakeheads. The remainder amounts to some GBP 500,000, a sum which, we are told pointedly, the UK government has refused to pay (Source: Martin 2019, p.244).

A hallmark of Broomfield’s style is to uncover uncomfortable truths, so it’s no surprise that his dramatisation of the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster made for queasily powerful viewing (Source: Whitelaw 2007, p.50).

Ghosts isn’t so unlike the rest of Broomfield’s oeuvre. It’s based on meticulous research, intimacy – he is renowned for spending months getting to know his subjects – and improvisation (Source: Ramaswamy 2006 p.3).

[The Morecambe Bay disaster] simply could not be conveyed with the use of documentary codes and conventions, and as the Granada TV executive Ian McBride has said, docudrama ‘takes the camera where the camera seemingly can’t go and in so doing gets privileged access to events’ (Source: Mathew 2014 p.21).

[Broomfield] decided to make a fictional film rather than a documentary as it was such an emotional story, he says. ‘I felt the way to tell this was not through interviews but to try and experience it through the eyes of somebody going through it, who goes on the long journey from their country and comes here’ (Source: Key 2007, p.3).

We have to take it as read that Ghosts is simply showing a representative, rather than an actual case, but its detached, unemotional approach carries a compelling polemical weight. … [It] is neither entirely a fiction, because it purports to depict typical, if not specific facts; nor what we commonly think of as docudrama, because there’s none of that interpolated documentary material (interviews, voice-overs) that have come to identify the style, at least in its TV manifestation. To be precise, Ghosts offers a detailed evocation of a damning phenomenon: the systematic exploitation in the West of illegal immigrant workers (Source: Romney 2997, p.8).

The subject finds Broomfield at his most outraged. A middle-class malcontent, he is a film-maker who highlights injustice and sometimes goes over the top (Source: Kinnes 2007, np).

What happened at Morecambe Bay in 2004 was shocking, but its background – why it had happened at all – made it a national disgrace. It was not an unfortunate accident; it was the inevitable consequence of a troubling set of circumstances, most of which remain unchanged. Why were these people out on the sands in foul weather and in the dark? Why were they all Chinese? How was it possible that nobody knew they were there? What desperate circumstances drove them to risk their lives, working in these awful conditions? In an attempt to answer some of those questions, Hsiao-Hung Pai, a reporter for a national newspaper, immersed herself in the world of illegal immigrants, gangmasters and exploitative labour (Source: Glazebrook 2006, p.9 link).

All of the stories in Ghosts are grounded in fact, from the actors’ own experiences to that of journalist Hsaio-Hung Pai, who went undercover living and working with Chinese illegals in Norfolk and with whom Broomfield worked closely on the film (Source: Ramaswamy 2006 p.3).

[Hsiao-Hung Pai:] Saddened by … the media’s response to the Morecambe deaths, I decided to work undercover with a group of undocumented Chinese workers to gain an understanding at first hand of their working lives in Britain. It took me more than two weeks to get the work-permit photocopy and the contact number for the recruiter in Norfolk that would enable me to enter this hidden world. There, in the country town of Thetford, I witnessed almost unbelievable exploitation. Legitimate British agencies were taking advantage of the unauthorised status of workers, employing them as a half-price army of labour to run the food-processing factories that supply supermarkets. I witnessed how these men and women risked their health and safety to improve the lives of their families, how they struggled from day to day with ruthless exploitation in a first-world country. They lived in social isolation, suffering constant insecurity and anxiety. My undercover news report encouraged wider reflection on the issue. TV programme-makers and film directors began to call. Some wanted to take a snapshot of the workers’ lives. Others were simply looking for sensational stories. But the proposal which interested me most was from the documentary-maker Nick Broomfield. His film about Morecambe, Ghosts, is released this coming week. It should be a timely reminder that, in many ways, the lessons of that terrible day still have not been learned (Source: Pai 2007, link).

Hsiao-Hung Pai … introduced Nick [Broomfield] to Chinese illegal immigrant workers living in the Kensington area of Liverpool. Nick says: ‘They were paying quite a lot of money in rent to live in these old, run-down houses. But one of the things that amazed me was that they were all scrupulously clean and there were pictures of their families in the rooms – which each had four or five mattresses in.’ On one of the visits, the writer went to post some packages back to China for the workers and they were weeping with gratitude – they couldn’t do it themselves because they didn’t speak enough English. ‘I got these feelings about how much they were cut off from everything. I had always thought about the Chinese being rather inscrutable and emotionless, but I realised they were amazingly emotional people’ (Source: Anon 2007h p.8).

These Chinese um illegal immigrants in in in Britain – or so-called illegal – were working for uh people like Grampian Foods um who were supplying meat to Sainsburys. They were working for Kerry Foods who were supplying Tescos. Um it was beautifully documented in Hsiao’s peace as well as producing a very human portrait of these people and their lives and their kindness to one another and I was very very moved by uh her pieces um and also just sort of amazed that there was this sort of complicity going on in this in this country. There was, all the supermarkets of course pretend they don’t know that they’re employing people in this fashion – many of whom are being uh underpaid and ripped off by people like Pertemps the employment agency who are a nationwide employment agency who were uh taking bribes and uh underpaying people charging people with uh with tax that was completely non-existent (Source: Broomfield in Cousins 2008, np link).

Meeting and talking with the cockle pickers living in Liverpool is an eye-opener to me,’ Broomfield says. ‘What struck me most is the dignity of the people living and working in such conditions. Everyone there has a tremendous story to tell. Everyone has a family to feed and has to wait for years before they can reunite.’ When he asked what music they liked, one said: ‘No time for music.’ ‘I was really moved by the solidarity coming out of the Morecambe Bay tragedy,’ Broomfield says. ‘It really brought to light … the horrific conditions facing Chinese workers in Britain, and highlights the prevalent situation for so many undocumented migrant workers, who live and work under a system many thought has been abolished in this country a long time ago’ (Source: Pai 2004 p.9 link).

It was a real eye-opener to immerse ourselves in the lives of immigrant workers who live almost unseen amongst us. As well as Chinese we met Portuguese, Bulgarians, Poles, South Africans and others living in squalor and intimidation. Some of them were basically slaves, unable or afraid to leave the control of their gangmasters for fear of reprisals against themselves or their loved ones (Source: Lewis 2007a, p.5 link).

To tell the story as authentically as possible, Broomfield took pains to cast real Chinese economic migrants in the lead roles (Source: Bashford 2006, np link).

He recruited a cast of non-actors, many former ‘illegals’ themselves, performing a script 80% of which is in Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles (Source: Hoggart 2007 p.5).

It was a world of which [Broomfield] knew little until Morecambe Bay. ‘Most people are ignorant when it comes to how their food is produced and the involvement of illegal labour in that, ‘ he says. ‘I have a house in Sussex, it’s a beautiful spot, and not 10 miles from there is a big area where immigrants are living in caravans’ (Source: Rowat 2007 p.17).

The first time I visited China was with my producer, Jez Lewis, and casting director, Shaheen Baig, in late January 2005. We wanted to get a sense of where these people we planned to make a film about came from, what kind of world they lived in, what it looked like. We’d been sitting in England imagining it and then realised we had to go and find out for ourselves. Most of the cockle-pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in February 2004 came from Fujian province; it’s an area where traditionally a lot of the people were fishermen or sailors and there’s always been a lot of migration, so we headed there. We were in the country for just two weeks, tearing around, driving madly backwards and forwards across China making virtually no impression on it at all, just building up a massive petrol bill, and staying in weird hotels in the middle of nowhere. We hired a fixer, Liu Chen, from Beijing and luckily he was super-patient – I think anyone else would have walked out, as we so didn’t know what we were doing. Part of going headlong into it is deliberate: I find that if you think you know what you’re doing, then you’re probably wrong. But Liu did keep asking, ‘What’s your plan?’ and we’d say, ‘We haven’t got one.’ He was amused, but he did want to do things by the book: if you’ve grown up in a country with a very authoritarian government and you’re not used to saying what you think, you act accordingly. If he was going to be involved, then we had to do it properly. He kept saying, ‘You have to apply for permission.’ We did once and got turned down, for which I was quite grateful, because then we could do it how we wanted. One thing we did have planned was to find a woman to play the lead part in the film. We looked in Fujian, but we also looked in other areas – we were hopelessly trying to cast people all over the place. At one point, Shaheen found someone in central China and we made a massive journey to meet her. We travelled thousands of miles on suicidal Chinese planes, having to take out extra insurance because they had such a terrible crash record, and then even further by bus, only to be met by the sister of the girl we were after: the girl herself was about to be married and her family wanted her unmarried sister to be in the film instead. That was a high point of frustration (Source: Broomfield 2007a p.20).

The mantra on ‘Ghosts’ was ‘make it as real as possible’. That’s why we cast real immigrants in the lead roles and also why we wanted to meet the families of the victims of the Morecambe Bay disaster. We had got in touch with them via Hsiao-Hung Pai, the journalist who wrote the articles on which Ghosts is based. Contrary to what I expected, the Chinese show their grief very openly, so it was emotionally exhausting, both for them and for us. It certainly wasn’t a shrugging of the shoulders, a ‘this is what happens’. I felt guilty for reopening wounds, but maybe they wanted to talk about it. It had quite an effect on us, though: after we’d met about four of the victims’ families, we just felt we couldn’t do any more, and I think we went a bit doolally. We tried to cast a woman in the lead who we met in Shanghai, and who turned out to be totally wrong for the part. The families’ biggest problem was that they had vast debts and were living under constant threat from moneylenders. It costs about £12,000 to get to the UK. It’s all done by ‘snakehead’ gangs; the immigrants borrow money from a moneylender to pay the gang, and their family back in China makes the monthly payments after they’ve gone. Obviously, the lenders charge huge interest, and harass the families – you’re almost their property until you pay the money off. In one instance, there was a brother and a sister whose parents had both died at Morecambe Bay and who were now being raised by the village. It looked like the daughter was going to be forced into prostitution to pay off her debt and there was nothing anybody could really do about it. We didn’t talk to the moneylenders or snakeheads directly; since we were doing all this in a rather unofficial way, it didn’t seem like a good idea. But the hotel we stayed at in Tsiang Lo was full of them, as they were the only people who could afford to stay there. They look just like gangsters anywhere: they wear suits, drive nice cars, smoke all the time and gamble. The hotel lobby was permanently full of prostitutes going in and out, and they would play mah-jongg till 6am when we were getting up. The hookers would have the most amazing orgasms that would go on for ages – even with toilet paper stuffed in your ears, it was just impossible to sleep through it. Then, when you finally did fall asleep, you’d wake up out of your mind, because the drug fumes would seep in under the doors. … Despite their troubles, however, some of [the victims’ family members] went to extraordinary lengths to help us. The sister of one of the men who had died even organised a big casting session for us. She knew all the girls in a shoe factory in a nearby town, and organised 90 or 100 people to come to the school where she was teaching to audition – even though she knew she might get into trouble with the authorities (Source: Broomfield 2007a p.20).

Although Broomfield planned to find a woman in Fujian to play the lead part, he eventually chose Ai Qin [Lin] who was already in Britain. She had travelled to Europe as an illegal immigrant, but has since become legitimate. ‘Ghosts is partly based on Ai Qin [Lin]’s own life story as she worked illegally for eight years in England. In fact, she hadn’t seen her son, Bebe, for five years – he was born in England and then sent back to China,’ he said (Source: Keshvani 2007 np).

Ai Qin Lin as Ai Qin … became the film’s central figure after impressing Nick [Broomfield] when talking about the child she had left behind in China (Source: Anon 2007h p.8).

[Ai Qin Lin:] At my lowest, I joined the Chinese Christian church in King’s Cross, north London. Pastor Lawrence befriended me and persuaded me to take part in Ghosts, a film about the plight of the 23 Chinese cockle pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004. Although I did not pick cockles, the conditions they had lived in were similar to my own: a bedsit with mattresses on the floor and paint peeling off the walls. Like them, I used to get racial abuse and once my boss at the factory refused to pay me. I met Nick Broomfield, the film’s director, who estimated that there are 3m migrant workers in the UK propping up the food service industry and agriculture. Yet there are so many restrictions and we are treated so badly. The families of the dead cockle pickers still owe snakehead gangs thousands of pounds and their lives are threatened. I had never acted before and I was very nervous. I was also a single mother and ashamed. I have a son, Sean, who is now six, but it had taken a lot of courage to tell my parents I was pregnant and only a couple of people knew I had a child (Source: Jolly 2007, p.7 link).

Ai Qin said modestly that she acted what she felt in real life. ‘The area I am from is where tourists don’t go, near Tsiang Lo in Fujian province in the south. No one outside China has even heard of Tsiang Lo. The people there live in old houses and feel they’ve somehow failed,’ she said. She noted that young people, who went abroad to earn money, built massive five-storey houses in bright colours when they came back. ‘There is a statue of Mao in town but the factories that were set up by Mao during the Cultural Revolution have closed. Since China joined the World Trade Organisation, all the subsidies – like medicine and schooling – have gone,’ she said. Hence, many people go abroad, usually illegally (Source: Keshvani 2007 np).

When we returned [to Fujian province] a year later, it was with Ai Qin Lin … We took her back to the little fishing village her family came from to film the early scenes of Ghosts. It looks very picturesque on screen, but there was real poverty there. People in the UK expect poverty to look like African famine; China’s not like that. … [S]he hadn’t seen her son, Bebe, for five years, who had been born in England and then sent back to China. The end sequence of Ghosts is her reunion with Bebe – reality meeting fiction – which we filmed in the airport right in front of two police officers on a little HD camera (Source: Broomfield 2007a p.20).

Neither ‘actors’ nor ‘themselves’, the figures that appear on the screen in Ghosts perturb the categories of drama and documentary. … As the mother reaches out to the impassive child, we see that – as she has feared – Bebe no longer recognizes Ai Qin as his mother. What the camera records, and what we are watching, however, is Ai Qin Lin’s reunion with her son, Sean and the pain of her realization that she is no longer recognizable to her child. In this heart-rending moment where Ai Qin’s worst fears become reality, a tension that has been evident throughout the film is made palpable. We are confronted with the fact that we have no words to describe the figures on the screen. They are neither actors nor ‘themselves’ (Source: Martin 2019, p.255).

The sequence allows us to believe that this is the film’s central character hugging her child, but the grain of the image and the raw emotion on display make it clear this is the real thing. ‘If we hadn’t been there Ai Qin Lin would not have got home to China at all,’ Broomfield says. ‘We spent months at the Home Office getting the various necessary documents. Otherwise, she would still be in this country having not seen her kid’ (Source: Anon 2007e p.4).

[The film] was made on a minute budget, using a single hand-held HD camera and what Broomfield calls a ‘teeny guerrilla crew’. … The entire crew could fit in one car, and the Chinese cast drove around in their own white van … Filming also took place in China’s Fujian province without official authorisation (Source: Hoggart 2007 p.5).

[Broomfield:] Myself and Ai Qin … went undercover, picking spring onions and working in a factory. … [Interviewer:] You pretended to be an illegal worker? [Broomfield:] I was pretending to be a South African, an Afrikaaner out of work, which is about the only sort of white English-speaking person who does that work. Ai Qin and I were a fairly unlikely couple, but we came in through the illegal route and paid money to gangmasters to get us the work and so on (Source: Calhoun 2007 p.51).

I had a feeling that Ai Quin would be able to stand the test … She’s been through a lot and was an illegal immigrant here for eight years (Source: Broomfield in Key 2007, p.3).

[W]orking shifts in factories and fields [was] an experience which left [Broomfield] feeling like he was ‘going to die’. ‘I remember picking spring onions for about eight hours, then getting three hours’ sleep and then being hauled up to go and work in a book factory (Source: Ramaswamy 2006 p.3).

[Interviewer:] And you filmed while working? [Broomfield:] Yes, I had a camera in a pair of glasses that were on my head. The problem with shooting and working at the same time was that I was working too slow. Most of it was piecework that we were doing and I was constantly getting fired for not keeping up. [Interviewer:] It sounds like your research methods were similar to making documentaries. [Broomfield:] Very, very similar, yes. In fact, one probably does more research for this. But it was invaluable having Ai Qin, who was a real illegal immigrant, with a kid back in China. Obviously, I could learn a lot from her (Source: Calhoun 2007 p.51).

Together, we went to pick spring onions and she knew I had the surveillance equipment on. We also did some filming in a book-packing factory and we did some cocklepicking in Wales. She was pretty tough (Source: Broomfield in Key 2007, p.3).

[D]uring filming, [she and the other actors] were required to perform the jobs portrayed and to live together in the Thetford house (Source: Pereen 2014 p.45).

Ai Qin’s tale unfolds in a wholly unfamiliar temporality … [of both] diasporic time and the time of labour. From [her] perspective England is a place which makes it possible to realize the dream of transforming her own life at home. England is a space of sacrifice and transformation: a place which is to be endured in anticipation of its power to transfigure an otherwise inescapable future. … It is Ai Qin’s experience of [a] distinctively diasporic temporality that provides the affective force of Broomfield’s film. … Diasporic time … is a time of suspension characterized by an intense and anguished desire to return home. … In contrast … this time of labour is depicted as mechanical, exhausting and ultimately fatal. … [In terms of spatiality, a]s the avatar of neo-liberal globalization, the migrant worker produces and reproduces an ideal of labour that is detached from locale. As Esther Peeren (2014) points out: ‘[t]he Chinese workers in Ghosts lack even a tangential connection [with their produce] as the products they process will be labelled local’ (2014: 42), and we should add that in thus cancelling any significant distinction between the local and the global they throw into focus an otherwise obscured connection between work and place (Source: Martin 2019, p.251-2).

For most of Ghosts, the soundtrack features … Chinese music. This music is in sync with the images of Ai Qin in China, but begins to sound dissonant as soon as she leaves home. Over the scenes of her strenuous journey, the music conveys not so much a nostalgic link to home as a sense of profound displacement and disconnection. In Britain, as Mr Lin drives Ai Qin to Thetford, this dissonance is made explicit when the Chinese music on the soundtrack is interrupted by the siren of a passing police car and the ringing of Mr Lin’s mobile phone. A later scene, however, shows Ai Qin and her fellow workers sitting in a park singing a Chinese song that reflects directly on their experience of homesickness. Ai Qin takes the main voice and the others, including Mr Lin, provide back-up vocals. The translated lyrics read: ‘A person wandering away from home is missing you, dear mum. / The steps of the traveler on the other side of the world, without a home. / The winter snow, with the snow flakes, soften my tears. / Walking on and on. / Walking across many strange places. / For many years.’ In singing this song, the migrant workers create a recognizable image of themselves as wandering subjects, … . Moreover, … the fact that the workers sing together in harmony indicates that they have forged a community among themselves. This community is uneasy (because of its enforced nature and the complex position of Mr Lin) and fragile (a few scenes later half of the workers are arrested in a police raid of the house). Still, it offers a way to conjure a shared song of remembrance through which the migrant workers can temporarily escape their circumstances. The resulting opening of their horizon is indicated by the closing shot, which shows a close-up of Ai Qin’s face in profile, looking up at the expansive blue sky (Source: Pereen 2014, p.63).

Broomfield’s influential documentary style has been developed with a bare bones crew of between three to five people. He found he was able to maintain this compact shooting method with HD. Shooting 35mm automatically necessitates extra people to manage the lenses and change magazines, and the whole backup of catering and transport, he said. Working in HD allows Broomfield to transmit less tension to the cast’s nonactors than if the camera were rolling film. HD’s ability to capture low lighting levels made it ideal to underline the dingy, realistic living conditions of the immigrants’ houses. He selected a Sony 750p camera with prime lenses. Cinematographer Mark Wolf wielded the camera handheld, although he said it would need someone with an athletic build to hold the unit for such a long time (Source: Pennington 2007 p.28 link).

New to the market at that time, promotional campaigns for the Sony HD750 heavily emphasized its ability to reproduce ‘Film-look’ qualities through its ‘25 Progressive (PsF) mode’ technology …, and as a result [Ghosts] combines the image quality associated with bigger budget productions with the mobility of documentary. … the affordances of the HD 750 …, in mixing the expectations of documentary with those of film-drama, raises questions about the status of the figures appearing on the screen (Source: Martin 2019, p.247).

[W]hen the tension between local cockle pickers and the Chinese workers turns violent and Mr Lin, the gangmaster, wrestles with a local in the muddy waters of Morecambe, water and mud splash the camera lens obscuring our view of the struggle, or, again, as Ai Qin is shut inside a secret compartment in the back of a truck for the final leg of her journey, we lose sight of her save for the part of her body illuminated by a shaft of light from a tiny aperture in the compartment. This source of noise is not so much unremarked as unremarkable: everybody knows the lens must be kept clean, that there must be sufficient light to see what is before the camera, that it must be possible to hear the actors speak. … In an early scene Mr Lin, having concluded that the workers’ calls for help will not be heard, instructs them to phone their families on the other side of the world to say a final goodbye. The precarious workers’ relationship to their environment, the scene reminds us, is particularly complex and heavily mediated by technologies of communication and circulation. More generally, we note that the interference of environment with image quality and thus the imperative to make visible can itself easily be made into an index of precarity. When the image fades to black because there is no light in the concealed compartment in the truck, or when water splashes on the camera’s lens in the fight between indigenous and migrant workers, or when the cries for help are carried away by the wind, diegetic noise directly signifies the ways in which precarious bodies are caught up in a fraught relationship with visibility (Source: Martin 2019, p.247-8).

Long takes, a hand-held camera in social space, and video contribute [Ghosts‘] formal register of realism and highlight the more mundane elements of labor. For the filming of the work sequences, whether in the poultry processing plant, the orchards, or the fields, Broomfield opted to film days of work. The shooting strategy mimics the observational documentary, allowing for the inclusion of the non-cinematic moments of staring, awkward silences, and even boredom, all of which are part of a day’s work. This strategy results in the depiction of the liminal moments that are so familiar, and yet typically absent from the spectacle of popular cinema, not to mention consumer consciousness. In this way, the patience of the observational mode recovers the disarticulation of worker, work, and product, creating a site of multiple scapes, performing a unity that combats the alienating elements of global capitalism. These flows are not distinct and separate, but features of this larger map. (Source: Torchin 2015, p.110).

Usually, a fiction film is said to be documentary-styled if it uses hand-held camera and dwells on the unkempt side of life: Ghosts qualifies there. But what distinguishes it from conventional fiction is the fact that it doesn’t have what script manuals call an ‘arc’ (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

Unlike most pictures of the genre, Broomfield refrains from big confrontational scenes, with the possible exception of the sequence showing the police breaking into the flat occupied by the immigrants. The life of Ai Qin and her friends is just as unexceptional, as dreary and dismal as that of any of the other migrant workers being herded from one temporary job to another, living their daily humiliations from one pay cheque to the next and kept alive by the weekly phone call back home that they can barely afford. Sure, they have their momentary distractions and laughs, but it’s far from enough relief from the daily drudgery they have to endure (Source: Fainaru 2006 np).

The tedium and despair … [is] depicted in bleak and unflinching detail, the naturalistic style owing much to Broomfield’s documentary background (Source: Whitelaw 2007, p.50).

[He] opts most of the time for a simple, documentary-type visual approach, stressing the dreadful accumulation of miseries rather than any single momentous event (Source: Fainaru 2006 np).

… there are a few spectacular shots along the way, such as the black waves spreading like predatory animals over the deserted beach at night (Source: Fainaru 2006 np).

On the night of 5 February, 2004, 23 people were drowned at Morecambe Bay. They had been digging for cockles on the sand, a mile and a half from the shore, when they were cut off by the incoming tide. Their plight had seemed scarcely imaginable as I watched the news from my sofa in London. It was beginning to seem a good deal more concrete as I stood on those sands a year and a half later, in October 2005. The wind blew horizontal rain into my face. The gluey sand clung to my boots. Visibility was minimal. Even though it was daytime, it was hard to tell in which direction lay the shore and in which the sea. The lights of Blackpool, stuttering on the horizon perhaps 20 miles away, seemed just as near or far as the glow from the nuclear power station a few hundred yards behind me. Between me and the grumbling, sour-looking sea stood a pitiful-looking group of Chinese actors (or non-actors acting, more accurately). They were scraping at the sand with rakes, their flimsy mackintoshes flapping in the wind and their inadequate footwear filling with sand and sea water. A short distance away stood a dented Transit van. Behind me, a couple of locals were mucking about on quad bikes. Occasionally, one would skid to a stop next to me, light a cigarette and say, laconically: ‘[You’ve] probably got another five minutes on this spot.’ … Middleton Sands, where we were filming, appear flat and featureless but are laced with channels that fill rapidly when the tide turns. What might look like an easy walk back to dry land could involve crossing a ‘river’, three feet deep, with crumbling banks. Our two local experts knew how long we could stay in one spot before a channel would make retreat impossible. Every moment, the sea was creeping closer. Soon it would be lapping at the ankles of cast and crew. Malcolm Hirst, the sound recordist, had already lost a Wellington boot to the quicksand. Nick [Broomfield] always wanted to get just one more shot, but everyone knew what happened if you thought you could beat the tide. When we were told to move, we moved (Source: Glazebrook 2006, p.9 link).

Filming on the sands at Morecambe certainly added realism, but it also brought real danger: ‘The cockle pickers actually threatened us. They told us in no uncertain terms that if we didn’t move they would do us in, which was pretty intimidating. They were belligerent and very territorial’ [said Broomfield] (Source: Anon 2007h p.8).

… while filming the drowning scene at night, the white van that the actors clinged to in the water was lost -possibly forever: ‘Yes, unfortunately it’s still there,’ confirms Nick. ‘When we started, there was a lot of pressure to go and film it in a water tank in Malta, but I thought it wouldn’t have authenticity and I wouldn’t get the same kind of performances from the actors. It seemed so important to shoot it in Morecambe Bay, which is this mix of the immensely beautiful and frightening’ (Source: Shennan 2007 p.8).

I originally talked to Channel 4 and said I wanted to do a film about modern slavery and they were lukewarm, but when I said I wanted to show how many of these people are hired by firms that are used by major supermarkets they were much keener (Source: Broomfield in Hurrell 2007 np link).

Channel 4 put up the money (Source: Rowat 2007 p.17).

‘Both films [Ghosts & Haditha which he made next] are very far from the standard way of making films,’ Broomfield says, ‘and that has only been possible because Channel 4 have fully funded both projects. It would have been impossible to get the films funded from a traditional source.’ I suggest that C4 might see his films as loss-leaders, earning valuable public service brownie points, and that this is a fortunate position for a serious film-maker to be in. ‘Well I think it is,’ he grins, ‘but I’m certainly not complaining.’ Both projects have been commissioned by More4 controller Peter Dale. ‘I think I might have choked on my tea,’ Dale tells me later, when I ask how he reacted when Broomfield first pitched the idea of Ghosts. ‘He is deeply ingrained as an observational documentary-maker, and I was taken aback because there would be no Nick Broomfield in it. But I think it’s part of a transition in Nick’s work from a slightly wry, off beat approach to a much more passionate and serious and political approach to his subject. In his more frivolous documentaries the joke had been wearing a little thin. Ghosts was a welcome return to form.’ There is perhaps a subtext to Broomfield’s insistence on making sure C4 gets full credit for bankrolling what both he and Dale admit are high-risk ventures. As Dale points out, he is an independent filmmaker who likes his films to be released in cinemas before they are screened on TV. If that process lasts too long and attracts too much attention, he adds, ‘it sometimes feels as if we’ve just acquired them’ (Source: Hoggart 2007 np link).

The film points the finger at supermarket chains – Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Asda are mentioned by name – whose codes of practice may not in themselves be unethical, but which are implicated in the chain of labour that exploits illegal immigrants (Source: Romney 2007, p.8).

‘The places the Chinese immigrants work in aren’t one-off mum and dad type operations. This is British industry – mainstream,’ [said] Broomfield … . ‘And there’s hypocrisy. When told about the situation, the supermarkets just say, ‘Oh sorry, we didn’t know. We won’t work with so and so again.’ But nothing changes. Until the supermarkets are targeted and made responsible for the way their food is produced, nothing is going to change. But who is going to take them on? They all make big contributions to both political parties. They are unbelievably powerful.’ Broomfield admits he was surprised at just how dependent the British economy is on the exploitation of illegal, and legal, immigrant workers: ‘We need them for the economy we have. And it’s so disappointing how [the] Labour [government] has been so mealy mouthed about the issue. Trade unionists who are trying to do work around agricultural labour, for example, are being frustrated.’ He says the decision to target the supermarkets in Ghosts made his job as a filmmaker very difficult: ‘They are so litigious. We had to prove that the spring onions we filmed being picked were definitely going to such and such supermarket. Some people are amazed that we even managed to name them in the film. People are so intimidated by these companies who think nothing of spending £2 million on fighting a lawsuit’ (Source: Anon 2007b np link).

Even if Broomfield lays it on with a trowel, there is no question it will make you feel uneasy next time you’re at the checkout. ‘I wanted to do a film about modern slavery,’ Broomfield says … ‘It’s ironic that, 200 years since the abolition of slavery, there are more slaves than there ever have been, just in a different form. I also felt it was interesting that so many illegals were working in the production of food, most of which is for the supermarkets. Somehow this is able to go on in this country, which prides itself on civil rights. I was horrified by what I learnt in making this film’ (Source: Kinnes 2007, np).

[Broomfield] applauds documentaries such as Jamie’s School Dinners, which succeed in changing behaviour, and has hopes that this film will, too. ‘I want there to be recognition on the part of the consumer that they benefit enormously from [illegal immigrants] and should take responsibility for what they buy, or they’re joining in exploiting the situation’ (Source: Bashford 2006, np link).

For me, the most important place for Ghosts to be shown is China, and I hope that my being so horribly negative about the country isn’t going to make it impossible. I think the film is very accurate and it would be useful as part of a dialogue between China and the West for them to see it. I think the more interchange there is between China and the West, the more chance there is of things opening up (Source: Broomfield 2007a p.20).

The effect on the [victims’] families [in Fujian] was horrific: we were with them as it was coming up to Chinese New Year, which must have been a time when a big payment was due, and they were literally begging us for money. That’s why we decided to set up the Morecambe Victims Fund, to help them (Source: Broomfield 2007a p.20).

Underpinning social realist art is a classical Marxist notion of consciousness-raising: removing layers of ideological obfuscation in order to reveal the underlying material truth. The perception of this truth, it is thought, will be enough to incite political mobilization and action. Broomfield’s main aim in making Ghosts was the mobilization of the cinema audience on behalf of the Morecambe Bay victims and their families. To this end, he launched a fundraising effort on the film’s website and organized campaigns against exploitative working conditions. In the DVD booklet, he adds: ‘I also hope that [Ghosts] stimulates discussion about legislation to restrict the supermarkets and the way in which they pursue their profits, and that it provokes the consumer to ask a few more questions about how, in this global economy, what they are buying is produced.’ The underlying premise is that, first, once a particular situation has been made visible, it can no longer be ignored …, and second, that exposing the ‘truth’ to people will automatically mobilize them to act not just on their own behalf but also for others (Source: Pereen 2014 p.45-6).

One of the highlights of the new year [at the Dukes cinema in Lancaster, 5 miles from Morecambe Bay] will be the screening of acclaimed documentary maker Nick Broomfield’s new film, Ghosts, which re-enacts the events leading up to the Morecambe Bay cockling tragedy in February 2004. ‘We’ll be showing it before it goes out on general release,’ said [playwright] Lesley-Anne [Rose]. ‘And we’re very pleased to have it. It’s just a shame he won’t be able to be here in person because he’s filming in Jordan’ (Source: Anon 2006b, np).

The Electric on Portobello Road [in London] was the venue for the premiere of Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts. The evening was a casual yet chic affair with neighbours including Gillian Anderson … and Bruce Oldfield tucking into Electric tubs of hot food and orange juice. Nick Broomfield … greeted all his guests enthusiastically before tapping them for cash for his Morecambe Bay Victims Fund. Cause celeb (Source: Urbanfox 2007 p.3).

The Miami International Film Festival, presented by Miami Dade College will host its annual Big Picture film and discussion this Saturday, March 3 at 7:00 p.m. at The Colony Theatre in Miami Beach. … The Big Picture program highlights films that tackle world issues and the human struggle for life and dignity. Often asking more questions than they answer, these films aim to increase awareness and inspire dialogue that will lead to understanding and meaningful change. This year’s film is Ghosts (Source: Anon 2007g np).

59-year-old [Trish Davidson] from Bristol is a full-time campaigner against one of the globe’s growing international crimes. Up to 4,000 women are trafficked into the UK each year, and to raise awareness, Trish organised the Unchosen Film Festival in Bristol last October, which attracted 600 people. She chose films that explored every aspect of trafficking, from the historic facts of the Atlantic slave trade to the growing numbers trafficked today for the sex industry, agriculture, manufacturing and domestic service. The festival was opened by esteemed documentary maker Nick Broomfield with Ghosts (Source: Evans 2009 p.12).

People trafficking and modern slavery will be the subject of a series of talks and events at Hope Baptist Church in November. ‘Freedom – A People Trafficking and Modern Slavery Event’ is to be staged at the church in Peverell from November 18 to 20. The event is aimed at everyone with an interest in the subject. It will start on the evening of November 18 with the showing of Nick Broomfield’s documentary, Ghosts. The documentary tells the tale of the fated cockle-pickers who died at Morecambe Bay in 2004. Entry will be free, but places need to be booked as numbers are limited. On the Saturday the event will feature guest speakers, including Detective Inspector David Dale of Devon and Cornwall Police’s Serious Organised Crime Investigation Team; Hilary Boot-Handford; and Graham Martin of Anti-Slavery International (Source: Anon 2011 p.17).

[Ghosts] was shown in the House of Commons because they were trying to get it possible for Chinese workers or workers generally to use the health facilities in the UK (Source: Broomfield in Mealey & Broomfield 2019 np).

Ultimately, it is the spectres of corruption, racism and unchecked capitalism which haunt this deeply felt film (Source: Geall 2006 np link).

[It’s a] haunting film which made for uncomfortable viewing. Just as it should have (Source: Tinniswood 2007, p.7).

The one form of agency the Chinese workers do possess is their collective power to haunt British society. … this enables them to act, not so much during their lives as through their shocking deaths, as a ‘return of the repressed’, revealing the extent to which everyday British life is underpinned by exploitation. While the notion that labor conditions in distant low-wage countries can be abysmal is generally acknowledged, what made the Morecambe Bay deaths so disturbing was that it placed human trafficking and the related dehumanizing living and labor conditions inside Britain, not just in the big cities but all over the country (Source: Pereen 2014, p.42).

At every angle [it] connects you to this truly sad affair and provokes us to ask what is the real cost of the food and products we buy (Source: Seen nd np link)?

At Morecambe Bay, Chinese workers lost their lives selling their cheap labour to the big corporations, producing products to be consumed in Britain and abroad. British society can no longer say, ‘It’s none of our business.’ … The question is how we fight the big corporations. I believe that the real solution is organising workers. We cannot rely on the supermarkets and their suppliers to change their ways. Workers need to be organised in order to fight their exploitation’ (Source: Pai in Anon 2007b np link).

[During] one visit to a major supermarket, … Ai Qin happens across the spring onions we’ve seen her picking in the preceding scene, [which] establishes our complicity as consumers in the workers’ fate (Source: McCahill 2007 p.19).

[But] those who purchase the cockles …, and who in a crucial sense profit from and ensure the reproduction of this form of exploitation remain literally invisible (=‘ghosts’); they are thus not seen to be part of the problem (Source: Brass 2007 p.348).

Who would have imagined that Nick Broomfield – the British filmmaker best known for quirky documentaries which are as much about him making the documentary as the subject matter – would (or could) deliver a feature film both evocative and solemn (Source: Tsui 2007 p.2)?

As a piece of realist drama, Ghosts makes no attempt to be stylistically interesting – no more so than a solidly researched piece of newspaper reportage – but the film is vivid, painful and uncomfortable, just as a newspaper story can be (Source: Cashmore 2006 np link).

[I]t’s a valuably tactless, steady, clear-eyed look at the tragedy and cruelty of the new globalised serfdom (Source: Bradshaw 2007, np link).

[It is] a piece of dramatic cinema which captures the essence of his documentaries, but involves the audience much more intimately with the subjects than has been possible in his previous work. From the use of a non-professional Chinese cast, through the purposely shaky camera work and even to the slightly poorly acted role of the English landlord whose property is crammed with 15 ‘illegals’, this film just seems real (Source: Cashmore 2006 np link).

The film is made with a cast from Fujian province in China, and shot so sparely, and with agonisingly aesthetic dexterity. I am awed by the accomplishment (Source: Burrows 2006 p.12).

As a study in exploitation it could hardly be more straightforward, and Broomfield’s script (with Jez Lewis) doesn’t really add much to what’s written all over Ai Qin Lin’s eloquently suffering face: show me the way to go home. Her untutored performance, and the knowledge that she herself suffered much as her character did eight years ago, lend an overwhelming pathos, while the horror leaks out of almost every frame (Source: Quinn 2007 p.6).

[In Ghosts, m]igrants are portrayed as ordinary people, like us, who do the same kind of things as we do – cycling with a child in a seat on the back of the bike, joining in games with children in the school playground – and have the same kind of hopes and fears. It would have been easy to sentimentalize their story, by imbuing it with an heroic veneer, but this Broomfield does not do. It is precisely by showing their ‘ordinariness’ that he succeeds in bridging the ideological gulf between the migrant-as-other and the selfhood of the film audience. If they are no different from us, we are forced to ask, why are they treated in this way? If they can be treated like this, moreover, can we not also be (Source: Brass 2007 p.346)?

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 (Source: itsacharliebrownchristmas@hotmail.com 2007 np link).

The use of non-professional actors working from a collective script has a number of effects which complicate the reception of the film by forcing the viewer to question what it is that they are watching. While the visual codes of the film world point us towards documentary realism, this strategy of using non-professional actors to re-enact their own experiences as undocumented workers inevitably works against any easy identification of the film with the codes of either documentary or drama (Source: Martin 2019 p.254).

The players in Ghosts are neither virtuosos, setting out on careers as performers, nor workers, for they are not producers. Rather, as workers who stand in for themselves, they become parasites on their own experience (Source: Martin 2019 p.255).

It has its weak points as drama – some stilted acting, especially – but when the topic itself is so in need of exposure, much can be forgiven in favour of the film’s social and political importance (Source: Calhoun 2007, p.50).

This movie, realistic and depressing, will leave you affected. The harsh transient plight of the migrant worker comes up to you like an unforgiving tide (Source: Keak 2007 np).

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 (Source: Johnjoe66 2009 np link).

[Ghosts] may be categorized as belonging to the ‘cinema of the affected’, also known as ‘cinema of duty’. This type of cinema, Angelica Fenner notes, addresses ‘a hegemonic viewership by evoking the viewers’ pity and sympathy, emotions which essentially affirm and perpetuate the static Manichean configuration of oppressor and oppressed’ (qtd. in Bardan 49). The marginalized are put on display and portrayed as ‘victims who lack individual autonomy’ (Bardan 49). While the lack of autonomy may, in certain cases, be an accurate representation, putting the oppressed on display threatens to transform seeing as recognizing, acknowledging and validating into looking at as voyeurism, spectacle and entertainment. In my view, Ghosts … avoid[s] looking at suffering instead of seeing it by largely excluding the hegemonic (white British) perspective from their narratives (Source: Pereen 2014 p.44).

Would Ghosts have functioned just as successfully as a straight documentary? One can easily imagine Broomfield interviewing the Morecambe bay survivors and door-stepping the corrupt enforcers (Chinese and English) at their suburban homes. But perhaps that would have lacked the claustrophobic intensity of this fact-based fiction; the sense of being inside looking out, as opposed to the other way around (Source: Brooks 2006, np link).

I found this boring. I have seen a documentary on this terrible tragedy which had far more insight and impact than this film. I didn’t learn anything from this , it didn’t answer any questions. Why travel 6mths to get to England? where were the English gang masters? How did they end up on the beach? Who gave them the jobs? Who was supposed to be looking after them? One minute they are working in a meat factory, the next on a farm, the next on a beach without any real story. I feel sorry for the people who have died and my heart goes out to the children involved. But this is a poor film, watch the documentary on this for the real story and answers. I can’t understand the 5 star reviews (Source: Wharton 2007 np link)?

Unfortunately, Broomfield’s approach to telling this tale was plodding, prosaic, very long indeed and – ye gods – wearyingly predictable. The facts of those 23 deaths cried out for someone – a skilled documentarist such as Broomfield, say – to go argy-bargying in with a camera and soundman to ask some pertinent questions. How can it be, for instance, that so many parties in modern Britain – employment agencies, landlords, foodprocessing factory managers, supermarket bosses – seem so easily able to turn a blind eye to iniquitous conditions of immigrant serfdom? And how long will we, as supermarket consumers, continue to sit back and ignore the fact that cheap food production exacts a hellish toll on some of those who work within the process? Get me Nick Broomfield’s phone number: I want him on hand when I visit my nearest checkout to brandish aloft a jar of cockles and ask if there’s blood in it (Source: Belcher 2007 p.21).

The scene in the supermarket, in which Al Qin discovered that she couldn’t afford the spring onions she helped pick, felt heavy-handed (Source: Whitelaw 2007 p.50).

[T]he dialogue … – as relayed through the English subtitles – … seem[s] stilted and marked by over-explication, as information about the conditions of migrant labour is worked into the ostensibly naturalistic format. We hear this … when Ai Qin and a friend comment on the difference between the price of onions and what they are paid for picking them (Source: Martin 2019 p.254).

Similarly, the scene in which Al Qin and a friend shared a brief moment of optimism upon arriving in Morecambe Bay seemed trite. Wondering aloud whether this move presented a new dawn for them, Broomfield ladled it on by painting a rainbow over the slate-grey ocean (Source: Whitelaw 2007 p.50).

That the main character, Ai Qin, is rescued from drowning, and as the only survivor manages to return to her family and child in China, … seems a partial concession to the necessity of a film – even about this kind of subject – having to have a ‘happy ending’ (Source: Brass 2007 p.348).

Moving as [the] sequence [where Ai Qin Lin is reunited with her real son at the airport] is, it does inspire some of the old questions about Broomfield’s techniques. Is it proper for us to watch the homecoming as entertainment (Source: Anon 2007e p.4)?

[Ghosts’] catalogue of horrors is so stark that anti-immigration factions could almost use Ghosts as propaganda to deter anyone from ever coming [to the UK] again: this island comes across as hostile, heartless, squalidly grubby, quite apart from the lousy weather (Source: Romney 2007 p.8).

On the surface, this seems a typically liberal work, pleading understanding for illegal immigrants, but there’s also a cry for Britain here frustration and incomprehension at how this situation came into being, at how supermarket culture hides evil practice. Ghosts may be what the Chinese call white people, but the spectre of a lost England also haunts this film (Source: Solomons 2007 p.62).

When [I] discussed the film afterwards, my [Taiwanese] friend broached what was an awkward but important question for her: how did I feel about hearing that Chinese people describe Westerners [like me], indeed, all non-Chinese, as ‘ghosts’? She pointed out that the title of Broomfield’s film was intended as a tribute to the lives and memory of the victims at Morecambe Bay. It was also an investigation of the possible tragic consequences of being perceived not only as an outsider in Britain, but also as a non-person, without any official status. But the film also referred to the social significance of the word ‘ghost’ from a Chinese perspective: a derogatory term for all foreigners, including those who had attempted to colonize and oppress the Chinese. Even so, in responding to my friend’s question I had to admit to feeling not especially harshly caricatured by the ‘ghost’ label. For me, the term evoked childhood memories of comic films: the jolly and mesmerizing image of Dan Ackroyd’s character in Ghostbusters for instance, energetically tearing up Manhattan in a jumpsuit to his signature tune, ‘If there’s something strange/In your neighbourhood/Who you gonna call?’. For me, ghosts were friendly creatures who had been tamed. As Ebenezer Scrooge put it to the Ghost of Jacob Marley in The Muppet Christmas Carol, there was ‘more gravy than of grave’ for me in the gravity of my friend’s searching question. She was responding both intellectually as a university researcher in Taiwan but also from her own life experience to the harsh implications of the dual oppressor-oppressed associations of Bromfield’s Ghosts. But for myself, from the comfortable context of western privilege and able to recall the hegemonic seductions of ghosts from popular culture, I could make light of her question. In doing so, I was dissociating and distancing myself from the full impact of the disturbing meanings of ‘ghost’ that the film explored (Source: Wainwright 2011, p.33).

Ghosts pursues the fashionable Leftwing agenda of instructing us to empathise with illegal immigrants. Broomfield shows us the seediest possible aspects of British life, and tries to make us feel that we owe anyone attempting to cheat their way into this hopeless country not only our hospitality but also our money. Why? He loads his story, which is a fictionalised one based on the 23 unfortunate Chinese cocklepickers who perished by misjudging the tide in Morecambe Bay, by making his central character a pretty young woman (played by real-life illegal immigrant Ai Qin Lin). Even this is not enough to dispel the feeling that Broomfield doesn’t want to acknowledge the illegality of her character coming here in the first place. Few of the characters make much attempt to integrate with the British culture – white people are routinely dismissed by the Chinese as insubstantial ‘ghosts’ – and they feel no guilt about taking British jobs. Needless to say, the indigenous cockle-pickers of Morecambe are portrayed as foulmouthed yobs. Quite possibly they are, but surely they had a legitimate economic grievance against incomers threatening their livelihood. One problem with Broomfield’s sympathy for the working class is that it is so selective. The early shots have a certain poetry – rarely has the rising of a tide looked more sinister but his attempts at gritty realism often look like melodrama, and repetitive, derivative melodrama at that (Source: Tookey 2007 p.55).

This year officially marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, yet there are currently three million illegal migrant workers in this country who can be classified as modern-day slaves. The government’s attitude towards these people is hypocritical. They pretend they don’t exist and refuse to recognise them. At the same time the UK economy would collapse without this pool of cheap labour (Source: Broomfield 2007b np link).

Capitalism depends on the ready supply of cheap labour – it isn’t just this government that refuses to recognise illegal workers, but other sovereigns who have the interests of big corporations to consider. The slavery that [Nick Broomfield] speaks of is an economic one, a slavery which is a byproduct of a global malaise. If people want to rid the UK of illegal migrants then they must be willing to pay higher costs for products and services (Source: MdmMao 2007 np link).

[T]he visibility of the Morecambe Bay deaths in the British media calls up the specter of immigration …, associated with a paranoid fear of being overrun by parasitic others that looms ever larger across Western Europe. … Here, becoming or being made visible does not produce agency but manifests as yet another mode of oppression … it is pertinent to ask what ‘becoming visible’ [via Ghosts] would entail … and how effective it would be when emerging from the shadows could lead to deportation or xenophobic violence (Source: Pereen 2014, p.43).

Nick Broomfield … says the [UK] Government ‘will do anything to avoid targeting industries which benefit from migrant workers. … ‘It’s consistent that the Government … ‘will do anything possible to avoid targeting industries benefiting from migrant labour in areas such as construction, housing and catering. Until the industries are targeted by legislation which makes them responsible for people working in these conditions, then the situation will continue. We all benefit from the employment of migrant workers who are paid nothing and work under appalling conditions. It’s not in anyone’s interest to change these conditions. We would end up paying for it and it’s easier to pretend it’s not happening’ (Source: Brookes 2006 np).

A ghastly postscript to the film reveals that the bereaved families in China are still being forced with menaces to pay back the debts accrued by their unfortunate relatives, which amount, apparently, to £500,000. ‘The British Government,’ we are told, somewhat balefully, ‘refuses to help them.’ Instead cinema-goers are urged to go to a website and donate cash themselves (Source: Orr 2007, p.18).

Because aesthetics has its own politics, there is no direct, assured relation between portraying, for example, the dispossession of undocumented migrant workers in a film and addressing, let alone changing, their position in society. While I would not state categorically that ‘political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world’ …, I agree that such awareness cannot be presumed to occur. While some viewers of Ghosts may be prompted to donate money or campaign for changes in labor regulation, others may interpret the film as a confirmation of their fears about jobs being taken by migrants or not assign it a political meaning at all. There is no singular truth to be made visible, art cannot ‘do’ politics through mere revelation, and the spectator is not a passive recipient of a pre-ordained message (Source: Pereen 2014, p.46).

[W]hy ever should UK taxpayers stump up (Source: Andrews 2007, p.11)?

Presumably, the Chinese government refuses to help its citizens as well, though so little is expected of that lot that its own dereliction is not deemed to be worth mentioning, let alone tackling. Therefore, the idea is that we all dip into our pockets to pay off a bunch of violent extortionists, to offset the decision that this may not be a suitable way of spending our taxes. Oddly, I find myself somewhat reluctant to do so. I’ve heard, dimly, of liberal guilt. But this is quite a trip (Source: Orr 2007, p.18).

There is a common misconception that donations to the cockle-pickers’ families will go into the pockets of the ‘snakehead’ gangsters who smuggled the victims into Britain. In fact, the snakeheads were paid off long before the accidents. The families’ huge debts are now owed to relatives, friends and neighbours. Typically in such situations, they have each lent 5,000 to 10,000 yuan (£330-£660) to a family to pay the cash that the snakeheads demand as soon as the migrant has been smuggled to his or her destination. These lenders, many of whom are poor themselves, charge interest of about 10% a year. And so the debt grows, and grows, devouring the lives of those left behind.Source: Watts 2007, np link).

Donating to the Morecambe fund, we know, does nothing to address the structural problems identified by the film. As such, the sense of agency with which Broomfield hoped to endow his project is already suffused with a sense of impotence. In giving, I am also giving in: recognizing my inability to do anything about the circumstances that connect my gesture with the precarious conditions of migrant labour. … Effectively, the appeal divides the world into two different spaces, each populated by two different types of body: those with pockets and hands to put in them – the film’s viewers – and those whose lives are lived in a condition of debt, whose money is already somebody else’s. … In this, Ghosts seems to substantiate Rancière’s argument that social realism may come to reinforce the structures it seeks to change: it demonstrates that the problem with starting a conversation about the reality of precarious labour in the UK economy is that the precarious labourer is not part of the conversation but its object (Source: Martin 2019, p.244-5).

Shouldn’t Broomfield be complaining about the conditions in [China] … that sent these desperate folk across the world in the first place? Shouldn’t he be reserving his picket place at the Beijing Olympics? Isn’t China where his film’s imperfect world begins and its true guilt belongs (Source: Andrews 2007, p.11)?

As it happens, Ghosts didn’t convince me – and didn’t even seem to be trying to convince me – that the Government was to blame for what happened to the cocklepickers. It convinced me of something much more controversial: that gangsters everywhere benefit from the gap between rich and poor. And that everyone who happily accepts that the poor ‘will always be with us’ bears some responsibility for what happened at Morecambe Bay (Source: O’Sullivan 2007, np link).

Ghosts is a masterpiece, a film that should be seen by everyone, and certainly anyone with an interest in the form taken by labour regimes in a twenty-first century capitalist agriculture, it should be seen especially by two categories of academic. One is composed of neoclassical economists, who insist – wrongly – that in a capitalist system all rural migration is not only freely chosen by its subject, but also non-coercive and empowering for workers involved. The other consists of exponents of the semi-feudal thesis, who insist similarly – and also wrongly – that unfree relations of production are incompatible with capitalism, and that where these are encountered, coercion is either an indicator of a non-capitalist labour process (when its coercive aspect is irrefutable) or not coercion at all, merely an incidental and unimportant dimension of what is in reality free wage labour (Source: Brass 2007, p.348).

[Broomfield:] The gang master is obviously, you know, he’s just a little guy who has got a house somewhere or he’s a cockle picker or he’s in, he takes people to the local, to one of the employment agencies and they might be picking crops in the fields or working in the processing of stuff, foodstuffs for the supermarkets and what happens is they are employed through these employment agencies so when you ask someone like Tesco’s or Grampian Foods do they know that they had undocumented workers working in their plant, they’ll deny it and say that they were dealing with the employment agency. So it’s a kind of a lot of turning blind eyes and everybody knows what’s going on. [Mealey:] … Why isn’t there that regulation of those employment agencies? Surely undocumented workers would be a red flag for all sorts of employment in the UK? [Broomfield:] … Because I think no government wants to be responsible for making the cost of living going up and you know, these Chinese workers are not only very, very good workers and hard working but they get paid a lot less so the foodstuffs and so on in England, the cost of living would definitely go up if it, you know, no government really wants to do that (Source: Mealey & Broomfield 2019 np).

Many people involved in these industries were already aware of the problems and had been campaigning for a Gangmasters Licensing Act for some time. So the Bill was rushed through [Parliament], with the hope that it would help to curb unscrupulous and illegal employment practices. But by the time we were filming more than a year had passed and nothing had changed. … the Act’s limited scope and lack of real bite raise doubts as to its power. For example, it has only just become an offence to use an unlicensed labour provider, and only in the farming and food processing sectors. It is hard to see how the real power holders, the super-markets, could be directly affected by this as they are in retail and, as they are quick to argue, several stages removed from the farms and food processors. While they tend to be strong on making sure they do things by the book with their employees, supermarkets distance themselves from abuses farther down the supply chain. At first glance this might seem fair enough, but the supermarkets do much to create the circumstances in which worker exploitation flourishes. A House of Commons’ Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee report stated in 2003: ‘We are convinced that the dominant position of the supermarkets in relation to their suppliers is a significant contributory factor in creating an environment where illegal activity by gangmasters can take root.’ The supermarkets make ethical business practice pretty much impossible for their suppliers through a combination of aggressive policies on pricing and requirements that supplies can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice. Continual price cuts are demanded or suppliers are threatened that the supermarkets will source elsewhere. The low prices we enjoy are achieved at great cost. Unsurprisingly, the British Retail Consortium, a body that campaigns to defend retailers’ interests, doesn’t see it like that. It says that its members are ‘very supportive of the new gangmaster legislation and expect all our suppliers to adhere to and operate within the law regarding workers’ pay and conditions.’ In reality, what is described as a ‘highly flexible workforce’ becomes, at best, desperate people who can see no alternative to labouring long and hard for little pay and with no security of income. This, inevitably, means the people most vulnerable to exploitation by piratical middle-men and gangsters. This includes not only undocumented migrant workers, but many people encouraged to come to Britain under government temporary work schemes (Source: Lewis 2007b, np).

The supermarkets unquestionably have the wherewithal to clean up their supply processes right down the chain – simply reducing the time and cost pressures on their suppliers could achieve much – but I suspect that only one of two things will make them do it. The first would be government legislation requiring it – a mirror image of this would be the regulations on disposal of hazardous waste, under which a duty of care applies to the producer of waste even after it has been passed on to another party such as a waste contractor or recycler. A similar duty of care in the opposite direction could make supermarkets legally responsible for ensuring that employment practices along their supply chains are legitimate and fair. The problem with this is that the supermarkets are such a powerful lobbying force that the government appears unwilling to tackle them. The other way would be through consumer pressure – the withdrawal of our custom. During our research for Ghosts we met a former Sainsbury’s buyer who told us that her training began with the Trading Director scoffing at the naivety of the new graduate recruits: one had suggested that their role was ‘to serve the customers’, but he made it clear that they were there ‘first and foremost to make the shareholders money’. We may well feel powerless as individual consumers making little more than gestures with our shopping choices, but my memory keeps prodding away at me with a news item I saw, stating that Sainsbury’s bosses were rattled by a forecast fall in profits of what seemed to me a trivially small percentage. The point was not that people had stopped buying stuff, but that they were buying their stuff from competitors. So, although it would no doubt cost the supermarkets something to tackle the abuses in their supply chains, if we can persuade them that inaction will result in a greater hit to their bottom line, I predict that they will act swiftly. This may be bar stool economics, but we’ve seen similar effects both with the uptake of shelf space for organic goods, and the wholesale rejection of GM foods. And, whilst I find it pretty much impossible to avoid the supermarkets altogether, most of us could at least reduce our spend with them. As they say, every little helps (Source: Lewis 2007a, p.5 link)!

The [Gangmasters Licensing Act 2004] … has clearly begun to have an effective impact on exploitation of migrant workers in the areas over which it has authority. The ‘down side’ is that gangmasters have moved on to other less regulated areas. Pressure groups and charities have been very active, and there is no doubt that the higher profile that has been generated on this problem by … films, documentaries and novels which have focused on these questions … along with the reports and debates in Parliament and elsewhere, have had an effect. [For example] … Britain has signed the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking of Human Beings, even though it has been suggested that not all of its provisions are being properly implemented. And finally the crisis which has struck the British economy since [the financial crisis of] 2008 has undoubtedly had a negative impact. It has sharpened still further the competition which encourages even multi-billion pound multinationals to use cheap, undocumented labour12, and it has led to budget cuts to charities and official agencies. For example, the GLA’s funding is to be reduced over the next few years as part of the general savings required in public expenditure. It would be a tragedy if the progress that has been made was reversed because of the cold economic climate (Source: Parsons 2012, p.7).

Morecambe’s MP has denounced a new film documenting the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster, as inaccurate and unfair. Geraldine Smith was invited to the premiere of acclaimed film-maker Nick Broomfield’s film ‘Ghosts’. However, the film left a foul taste in Geraldine’s mouth as local cocklers were portrayed as aggressive racists, who threatened the Chinese so much they would only go cockling at night. In fact, cocklers from Morecambe and surrounding areas tried to warn the Chinese about the dangers of the bay and held a collection when disaster struck. Chinese cocklers were, indeed, threatened, but by large rival gangs from Wales and the Dumfrieshire area. Geraldine said local cocklers had behaved in an honourable way and had contacted her as they were concerned about the safety of the Chinese people. ‘The part about going out at night because the local cocklers were so aggressive was nonsense,’ said Geraldine. ‘It spoiled the whole film for me. My understanding is that the Chinese cocklers were out all day and all night because they wanted the cockles’ (Source: Anon 2006a np).

Jez Lewis, who worked in partnership with Nick Broomfield on his film ‘Ghosts’, feels that Geraldine’s comments in last week’s Visitor do not accurately reflect the portrayal of Morecambe cocklers. Jez said: ‘We make no suggestion in the film that cocklers local to Morecambe Bay were responsible for attacking the Chinese. In ‘Shooting Ghosts’, a documentary about the making of the film, there is a moving interview with a Morecambe man expressing deep sadness about the tragedy. We were helped in all sorts of ways by Morecambe locals in making the film, for which we remain extremely grateful. … Nonetheless, if there is any doubt as to the ongoing hostility and aggression on the cockle beds around the country, Shooting Ghosts contains a live record of a group of British cocklers spontaneously and aggressively hounding the film crew and Chinese cast off the beach during the filming of a cockle-picking scene’ (Source: Kent 2006 np).

[D]espite obvious good intentions, Nick Broomfield’s docu-drama about the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster only tells part of the story. Perhaps this is because the trial of [gangmaster] Lin Liang Ren was taking place during the filming, therefore not every angle could be covered. Sadly, ‘Ghosts’ does not convey the full extent of the corruption behind the cockling industry in Morecambe Bay and the massive failings of the authorities which led to the deaths of the Chinese people. Nor, in my view, does it paint an accurate picture of why the Chinese people came to be fishing in the pitch dark on that terrible night in 2004. … The film makes out that the Chinese were cockling at night because they were afraid of being attacked by other cocklers. This may have been a factor in their decision (the Chinese were attacked by rival cockling gangs), but from the start of the cockling ‘gold rush’ the Chinese were out day and night cockling. Desperate to pay back the Snakehead money lenders and to make money for their families in China, they were out at all times, in all weathers and fishing for all sizes of cockles. As a reporter and local resident, I witnessed it myself, week in, week out. On the night of the tragedy, local cocklers tried to warn the Chinese people not to stay out, but their gangmaster Lin Liang Ren had taken an order for a vast number of cockles and two articulated lorries were coming to collect the cockles on the night of February 5 at 7pm and in the early hours of the morning. Tens of thousands of pounds would be paid for large hauls of cockles. Even though the tide was coming in he ordered his workers to stay on the sands. Strangely Lin Liang Ren, who was convicted of 21 counts of manslaughter in 2006 (two bodies remain to be found), was portrayed as a relatively sympathetic character in Ghosts, but this may also have been due to the fact that the full details only came out after the trial. The trial judge said Lin Liang Ren had ‘cynically and callously’ exploited people from his own country and that ‘with extreme cowardice’ he had sought only to save his own skin and added that throughout the trial he had not show ‘a flicker of remorse’. His defence barrister had also claimed that due to threats from British cocklers they were working at night, but this was rejected by the court. … Undoubtedly the authorities also failed the cocklers, and this comes across clearly at the end of the film (Source: Kent 2007 np).

The Morecambe disaster was recognised as a crime by a British court. Unable to read the warning signs on the beach, the victims were trapped while picking cockles by fast-moving tides on the notoriously treacherous sands. When their gangmaster, Lin, was convicted of criminal negligence the judge at Preston crown court said the accused was motivated by greed to shockingly exploit his countrymen with no heed for their safety. But because the victims were all illegal migrants, their dependants have received no compensation, meagre charity, and endured such appalling harassment from debt collectors that several have been driven from their homes and at least one woman has killed herself. It is as if they have fallen into a crevasse between justice and charity, from which there is no way out. Although this was a made-in-China and consummated-in-Britain tragedy, no one wants to take responsibility for the consequences. The authorities in Beijing have washed their hands of the matter. The British government has paid to send the bodies home, but it is reluctant to do more for fear of encouraging other illegal immigrants. Lawyers in London are pressing a claim for money from Britain’s criminal compensation fund, but if a payment comes at all it could take years. ‘It won’t be easy,’ says David Tang, the London lawyer who represents the victims. ‘There is no precedent … All we can do is wait.’ Charitable appeals have made little progress. The UK Fujian Association gave 10,000 yuan (about £660) to many of the victims, but this was barely enough to pay for the funerals. Nick Broomfield, who made the 2006 film Ghosts about the tragedy, set up the Morecambe Victims Fund with the Guardian journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai last August aimed at raising £500,000 for the victims’ families. Almost a year on, it has collected only £20,000, including £5,000 that ITV donated after its recent Bafta. (Source: Watts 2007 np link).

At the end of the film, subtitles inform us although a few people have been convicted, the victims’ families are still in debt (Source: Lu 2007 np link)

Broomfield and his producers set up a relief fund to help the families of the victims (Source: Higson 2009 p.13).

Broomfield’s request for audiences to contribute to the Morecambe Bay Victims’ Fund has raised serious ethical questions. The fund aims to raise £500,000 for the families of the Morecambe Bay victims, many of whom are still indebted to the traffickers who brought their relatives to the UK.’ By paying these people off wouldn’t we simply be contributing to the cycle of exploitation?’ asked an audience member at the film’s première when Broomfield made his proposal. ‘Are you asking us to give money to gangsters?’ chipped in another. For a moment Broomfield, who is more accustomed to making his own interviewees squirm, looked distinctly uncomfortable. … Broomfield hopes that the film will ‘raise awareness about the exploitation of immigrants which forms the backbone of food production in this country.’ He established the Morecambe Bay Victims’ Fund with the film’s producer Jez Lewis and the Guardian journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai after a research trip to China. ‘The families live in a very poor part of the country, and they are now struggling with debts of £15,000 each,’ he says. ‘There is one family in which both parents drowned, leaving a boy and a girl orphaned. They are now responsible for the debt, and in order to pay it off the girl will be forced into prostitution.’ He rejects the notion that the aims of the fund are ethically questionable. ‘It’s all very well for the audience in the rarefied setting of the Odeon West End to raise this issue,’ he says. ‘But these moneylenders are not like your friendly aunt – if you don’t pay them, they will kill you. This is a way in which some of the immediate victims can be helped.’ Mike Kaye, of Anti-Slavery International, says that the Morecambe Bay families are in a ‘unique’ situation, but warns that in some instances paying off such debts can be counter-productive. ‘In Sudan, for example, it is widely accepted that paying for slaves’ freedom is not the solution, as it helps to fuel the civil war,’ he says. ‘But the ethics depend on the detail of each case. Governments have to take responsibility for people trafficking.’ The British-Chinese support organisation Min Quan has been lobbying the British government for compensation for the incident, so far without success. ‘It is the UK’s immigration rules which create the lucrative environment in which these gangsters operate,’ says its spokesman, Jabez Lam. ‘And besides, we should give immediate assistance to these families simply on humanitarian grounds’ (Source: O’Keeffe 2006 link)

It was believed that the public were reluctant to contribute to the fund because they feared that the money would only end up going into the pockets of the “snakeheads” who had organised the trafficking in the first place. When this was shown not to be the case contributions flowed in and the fund was later closed once its target had been reached. Most reports on illegal workers in the UK make some reference to the incident (Source: Parsons 2012, p.182 link).

THANK YOU! We are delighted to announce that the Morecambe Victims Fund has now closed because its aim has been met. All of the crippling debts inherited by the families of the victims of the Morecambe Bay Tragedy have been paid off. It remains for us to thank you all most sincerely for your kind support in coin, in kind, and with your solidarity … Since the tragedy, each of the families has inherited a huge amount of debt of up to £20,000. In December 2008, the 22 families’ last hope of receiving any compensation from the British government was dashed when their application to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority was rejected. The Morecambe Victims Fund was set up in 2006 at the launch of the film Ghosts by Nick Broomfield, to raise money to relieve the burden of debts for the victims’ families. Its Trustees are Nick Broomfield, director of Ghosts, and Jez Lewis, producer of Ghosts. Since then the Fund has sent over donations from the public to help pay for the families’ living expenses and their debts. The families’ situation was desperate: to work and support their families, 11 out of the 36 children of the 22 families had dropped out of school (Source: Anon ndb np link).

Ghosts, picked up a respectable 122,000 viewers (1.15%) over two hours on More4 last night. The programme began on a high with 220,000 (1.34%) in the first 15-minutes from 10pm but saw its audience size decline over the time it was on air. It had just 81,000 viewers at the end of the two-hours. However, its share, while taking a dip in the middle, ended on a high of 1.44%. [This] … was comfortably above the channel’s slot average for the year so far of 72,000 (0.62%) (Source: Rogers 2007 np).

While immigrant issues are very much in the news, specifics unique to Britain and the gritty reality of the story might limit its theatrical potential in the U.S. But it should play very nicely on cable outlets (Source: Greenberg 2008 np).

More than 24 hours [after watching Ghosts] I still feel somewhat shaken by the experience … Ai Qin is picking spring onions and casually asks someone where they go when they are picked. She’s informed that they are sent to Asda, Sainsburys, Tesco … Sitting on my bus on the way home, it occurred to me I hadn’t been shopping and had nothing in for dinner. The thought of going to my local Sainsbury’s made me shudder – how can I buy my fruit and veg from there when the agricultural workers supplying this produce are so exploited? My thoughts then turned to the organic vegetable boxes I sometimes order, or the farmers markets I buy from. And I remembered the scene in the film when a local farmer picks up Ain Qin and the others for a days labour, picking apples. There’s so much focus at the moment on organic produce and ethically sourced produce, how do you really know that no one has been exploited in the process of getting that produce from a field in Norfolk to the fridge in your flat?… this was perhaps the most powerful for me, boiling it down to the lifestyle choices I make (Source: GeoBlogs 2007 np link).

Broomfield’s next project is another fact-based drama, this one about the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha. He’s also in talks about an animated film on the life of Mandela. Ghosts seems to have given him confidence to work outside documentaries again (Source: Rowat 2007 p.17).

Having just completed Ghosts, in which he used Chinese migrants as actors, Broomfield decided to do the same with the Marines in Battle for Haditha. The dialogue was to be improvised, with no script as such, just an outline of where the story was going (Source: Philp 2007 p.13).

Investigative journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai specialises in undercover work on the lives of immigrant workers. In Sex: My British Job Hsiao once again works with director Nick Broomfield, with whom she first collaborated in 2007 for Ghosts …. Sex: My British Job is a chilling exposé as Hsiao works undercover as a housekeeper in London brothels and unveils the terrible reality of the British sex trade. Hsiao embarks on a prolonged period of secret filming, using cutting-edge camera glasses, to expose not just why illegal workers turn to sex work, but how, through a complex combination of pressure and verbal abuse from the brothel owners, the lure of high earnings and the guilt they are made to feel about not providing for their families back home. This eye-opening film shows how easily Chinese and immigrant women can be drawn into sex work and highlights the shocking reality of what is happening behind closed doors up and down the country (Source: Anon 2013 np).

The part in Ghosts … transformed [Ai Qin’s] life. She and the film crew went on a two-week trip to Jinfen, where she was reunited with her son and her mother. Having been separated from Ai Qin since he was a baby, her five-year-old son did not recognise her. It is a scene that is painfully played out in Broomfield’s film. Ai Qin now has permanent residency in Britain, and her son has joined her. ‘Maybe Ghosts will help the British people understand us,’ she says. ‘I do hope so’ (Source: Pai 2007 np link).

[Ai Qin Lin:] Now I have found friends and support and I am studying English three days a week at a college in Birmingham. I am also a permanent resident; but only because I got arrested at work and a lawyer helped me to claim asylum. My parents have not seen the film; they are not proud of me. They wish, and I wish, that I had stayed in China. I came here to make money for myself and my family; instead I am struggling to raise a child on my own. But now that I am settled here, I am determined that our future will be better (Source: Jolly 2007, p.7 link).