STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
When 23 illegal Chinese cockle pickers drowned on the shores of Morcombe Bay in 2004, it exposed a dark, organized criminal underworld that most of us are probably vaguely aware of but blissfully turn a blind eye to. A secret, controlled network between organized gangs here and in places like China. This film follows the story of real life illegal Ai Qin, who travels to Britain from China in a sealed box in the back of a lorry in order to provide a better life for her son. But when she arrives in the UK, the only thing she finds waiting is domineering slave masters, disgusting living conditions and awful jobs with low pay. It all carries on with no solution until the night of the ill-fated MB disaster, which she was one of the few lucky enough to survive.
Nick Broomfield, of Kurt and Courtney fame, has gone to pain-staking lengths to dramatize an imagined drama of what likely happened on the night of the Morcambe Bay cockle-picking disaster, staging a painfully authentic and believable tale that pulls no punches and tells it exactly like it is. All the cast, headed by real life immigrant Qin, pull off honest and earthly performances in a depressing and hopeless tale with some surprising little dashes of humour here and there that perk things up a bit.
The only bum note is the unfairly sympathetic tone Broomfield chooses to accompany his film, tugging at our heart strings with the information of the immigrants spending six months on their journey to the UK mostly concealed in boxes, how most of them will never see their families again, how the British government still refuses to help the families back in China and how awful it all is. Poverty must be an awful thing, but these people did come over to our country unlawfully, taking jobs with forged documents that belonged to unemployed British people, and must have had some idea of the risks involved. To try and imply that our government should help when they were offered no protection or right to work here in the first place does seem a bit over the top to me. It is a very tragic tale all round, though, and one Broomfield, and his cast made up of other illegal immigrants (performance or re-enactment?) have brought to life quite powerfully. ****
When 23 illegal Chinese cockle pickers drowned on the shores of Morcombe Bay in 2004, it exposed a dark, organized criminal underworld that most of us are probably vaguely aware of but blissfully turn a blind eye to. A secret, controlled network between organized gangs here and in places like China. This film follows the story of real life illegal Ai Qin, who travels to Britain from China in a sealed box in the back of a lorry in order to provide a better life for her son. But when she arrives in the UK, the only thing she finds waiting is domineering slave masters, disgusting living conditions and awful jobs with low pay. It all carries on with no solution until the night of the ill-fated MB disaster, which she was one of the few lucky enough to survive.
Nick Broomfield, of Kurt and Courtney fame, has gone to pain-staking lengths to dramatize an imagined drama of what likely happened on the night of the Morcambe Bay cockle-picking disaster, staging a painfully authentic and believable tale that pulls no punches and tells it exactly like it is. All the cast, headed by real life immigrant Qin, pull off honest and earthly performances in a depressing and hopeless tale with some surprising little dashes of humour here and there that perk things up a bit.
The only bum note is the unfairly sympathetic tone Broomfield chooses to accompany his film, tugging at our heart strings with the information of the immigrants spending six months on their journey to the UK mostly concealed in boxes, how most of them will never see their families again, how the British government still refuses to help the families back in China and how awful it all is. Poverty must be an awful thing, but these people did come over to our country unlawfully, taking jobs with forged documents that belonged to unemployed British people, and must have had some idea of the risks involved. To try and imply that our government should help when they were offered no protection or right to work here in the first place does seem a bit over the top to me. It is a very tragic tale all round, though, and one Broomfield, and his cast made up of other illegal immigrants (performance or re-enactment?) have brought to life quite powerfully. ****