Nick Broomfield feature screens at London Film Festival
October 26th, 2006 by Zsofia
Broomfield’s new feature film “Ghosts” re-enacts the events leading up to a 2004 British seashore tragedy (at Morecambe bay) in which a group of Chinese cockle-pickers were killed by the fast-moving tide. Broomfield seems to have stayed true to his documentary tradition as much as he could, by employing non-professional actors, and using hand-held cameras and true-life locations. (He did not write himself into the script though.)
Excerpts from the Guardian’s review: “The film’s heroine is an impoverished Chinese mother (Ai Qin Lin) who borrows $25,000 to pay a local gang to smuggle her into the UK. Once there, she is delivered to a brutish enforcer who “finds” her work gathering apples, picking spring onions and “preparing meals for Sainsbury’s supermarket”. 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). 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.
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.
There is little doubt that “Ghosts” paints a grimly compelling picture of these modern Dustbowl migrants; separated from the rest of us by the language they speak and the work they are forced to take. Shuttled from one exploitation to the other, they eventually fetch up on the quick sands of northern England as the dark water creeps in to cover their van. After all the humdrum humiliations and social-realist authenticity, Broomfield’s film bows out with an elemental frisson. Its final scene is as horrifying as anything in the work of Hideo Nakata.”
The film’s website: http://nickbroomfield.com/Ghosts/press/index.html
