Ghosts (DVD)

Nick Broomfield-directed dramatisation of the story of 23 Chinese illegal immigrants lost in Morecambe bay in 2004. Ai Quin (Ai Quin Lin), a young Chinese girl from a rural area, pays $25,000 to people smugglers to be brought to the UK in hopes of supporting her family back home. However, rather than a land of milk and honey, she finds the UK offers her only a series of menial, disastrously paid jobs in food preparation for large supermarket chains and a cramped, dingy hovel of a home she must share with eleven others in the same boat. Finally, they're sent to work picking cockles illegally in the dangerous tidal waters of Morecambe bay by night, under brutally grasping gang bosses. By using untrained actors, many of whom are former illegal immigrants themselves, Broomfield lends a chillingly real documentary feel to this portrayal of the inhumanity being meted out on a large fraction of an estimated 3 million illegal workers in the UK today.