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.

Arbeitswelten | Working Worlds 2008
Nick Broomfield
Great Britain 2006
color
94 minutes
OV with English subtitles
Screenplay Nick Broomfield, Jez Lewis
Cinematography Mark Wolfe
Editing Peter Christelis
With Ai Qin Lin, Zhan Yu, Zhe Wei, Man Qin Wei, Yong Aing Zhai, Devi Zhu, Shaun Gallagher
Production
Channel 4 124, Horseferry Rd. SWIP 2TX London +44 207 396 4444 F +44 207 306 6420 thighsted@channel4.co.uk www.channel4.com