Ghosts

Nick Broomfield’s film, produced for Channel 4, is in a format that is unusual for a documentary filmmaker: a TV drama with echoes of docu-drama and neo-realism in the age of digital videos. Similarities with living persons and events are intended in this dramatisation of the “Morecambe Bay Disaster”: In 2004 21 illegal Chinese migrants drowned on the British Atlantic coast while gathering cockles at night. Broomfield’s film de-romanticises the “modern nomadism” of labour migrants, granting a tragic dignity to the “invisible people” killed in such a miserable way.