He is probably best known for his films on the serial killer Aileen Wuornos’s, but also made documentaries on musicians, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, Biggie Smalls and Tupak Shakur.  But, he has always been interested in the social dimensions of the cultures in which his subjects lived and has explored South African apartheid twice with Eugene Terre’Blanche.

In the late 1980s he tried his hand at a fiction film, Diamond Skulls, about the upper classes in Britain.  It was not particularly successful.  Now he tries again with Ghosts.  This time he has been very successful.

Ghosts is what the Chinese illegal immigrants into Britain call the locals, a generic term for the white inhabitants of the British isles, but becoming more derogatory as the migrants experience the harshness of the people and the work, that Britain is not the fulfilment of their dreams.

The starting point of the film is the death of 23 Chinese workers, gathering cockles in Morecombe Bay and caught by the rising tide in February 2004.  The prologue shows the beginning of this disaster and comes back to it at the end, highlighting the local hostility to the Chinese which resulted in fights and bashings and led to the Chinese deciding to work at night – and being caught by the tides.

The central character is a young Chinese mother who is persuaded by the plausible spiel of rogue agents that within a few years she will be able to earn enough money to return home.  The device of a map for the migrant journey from China shows a group going via some of the old Soviet republics to Russia and then south through eastern Europe across to Calais, hiding by night, walking, crushed in a container crossing the English channel.

While the narrative is always interesting, Broomfield capitalises on his documentary abilities to film in such a way that we feel that we are right there, a naturalistic approach of frame design, camerawork and clear colour photography that looks completely real.  The crowded flats, the agency offices, the meatworks, the vegetable gardens, the supermarkets.  This makes the story completely authentic.

But, we also see everything from the young woman’s point of view, listen to the bully Chinese boss in England through her ears, especially as he proposes alternate work in the sex industry.  At times, she prays in despair.  At other times she has the consolation of ringing her mother.

Broomfield offers a final challenge to governments.  He has no solutions but wants to offer a real picture of the plight of the illegals and their exploitation.

Ghosts can be seen along with a number of recent films about migration, illegals and crime: Dirty Pretty Things, In This World, Promised Land, And My Name is Justine, Separate Parts.

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