The Virginia Film Festival is revered and adored for its inclusion of films of all genres and varieties, and this year's Ghosts (2006) is surely one-of-a-kind.
Directed by Nick Broomfield, Ghosts is a riveting and compelling dramatization of true events. Broomfield, who typically produces documentaries, has stepped slightly outside this role to create something more gripping and shocking.
The film features the real Ai Qin and other former Chinese immigrants, adding a dimension of authenticity and real experience to the narrative. The story follows the life of Ai Qin, who lives in an oppressive Chinese society and cannot find work in her city. She discovers the only hope is to escape and become one of -- she will soon learn -- three million illegal immigrants in the United Kingdom. She pays the required $25,000 to leave her baby boy, mother and father, and joins several other illegal immigrants in a month-long journey to "freedom."
The journey, however, foreshadows what is to come. The immigrants experience life-threatening situations such as being packaged in boxes and stored in the backs of trucks, unable to see the sun for days. Broomfield does a good job of drawing you to the characters; I found it oddly easy to sympathize with an admittedly foreign situation. The hardship of the workers, specifically Ai Qin, does not lessen when they arrive in the U.K. -- instead, she is taken by a Chinese gangmaster to live in a crumbling, inhospitable house, sharing a room with several male immigrants.
Ai Qin breaks down a few times, after calling her parents and speaking to Bebe, her son. She finds comfort and solace, however, in her friendship with Xiao Li, one of the male workers. Together Ai Qin and Xiao Li go from thankless job to thankless job, starting with work in a meat factory to being farm hands to cockling on the Lancashire coast. The workers are completely taken advantage of, working 10- to 12-hour days and being paid only 100 pounds per week; however, they cannot complain. After visiting an employment agency to collect her wages and receiving much less than she expected, the gangmaster yells at Ai Qin, "You're nothing -- an illegal -- and should consider yourselves lucky."
Despite their suffering and poverty, the immigrants do, apparently, consider themselves luckier than the white natives. Referring to them as "ghosts," they often allude to their greediness, selfishness and mock their lack of depth. The immigrants seem thankful they are not these "ghosts."
Their final job of cockling is a desperate attempt to find work and send remittances home to their families. They spend windy, bitter cold hours at the shore, only to be terrorized by natives during a physical fight that leaves several of them bruised and scarred. In a determinacy to finish the job and earn their wages, the workers set out at night, unaware of the extreme dangers of the high tide and the tragedy that will befall the group.
In the true style of the Festival's theme, "Kin Flicks: Families in Film," the film portrays the lasting bonds of Ai Qin with her family and son. Ghosts will tug at your heartstrings as it portrays not only the distress of the workers' manual labor, but also develops personal relationships among characters, leaving you with a spirit of appreciation and gratitude for the comfort and ease of your own life.
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