Shooting Ghosts - The Making of Ghosts

At times, the boundary between fact and fiction in is just as thin as in , the feature film it deals with. In the opening shot, a scene from Nick Broomfield's docudrama that was filmed on the beach almost seamlessly switches to newscast images and documentary footage that director Marc Hoeferlin shot in Morecambe Bay. There, during the night of 5 February 2004, 23 illegal Chinese immigrants who were collecting cockles were drowned by incoming tides. Broomfield took this catastrophe as the starting point for a film based on true events about the lives of illegal Chinese immigrants in Great Britain. The young filmmaker Marc Hoeferlin wedges his "making of" between two editions of the Hay-on-Wye Film Festival, because this is where he met Broomfield for the first time. One year later, Hoeferlin came back to Hay-on-Wye for the premiere of . At that point, he had already completed the "making of." The film alternates footage of his undercover research from a spy cam hidden in a pair of eyeglasses, street auditions and a bus stuck on the beach with conversations with the victims' relatives and the true story of Ai Qin, who plays the leading part. Background information is provided by the voice-over and an interview with Broomfield about the ins and outs of .