The Times BFI 50th
London Film Festival

Almost Adult
Yousaf Ali Khan
Ghosts
Nick Broomfield

Iona Firouzabadi
posted 16 November 2006

The question is: is it fiction or documentary? You're increasingly likely to play a game of spot the difference at film festivals around the world. It's no longer enough for cinema to make the claim 'based on a true story' and then present us with actors. We want it raw and real.

The integrity of a film can be measured ever more by how much it elides the line between interpretation and reality. So the new breed of festival favourites is a shape-shifting species that straddles a blurred boundary between documentary and drama. Its characteristics are varied but often include non-actors and handheld camerawork. The genre encompasses the remarkable 2002 releases City of God and In This World and is influenced by practitioners as diverse as Ken Loach and Abbas Kiarostami. This year at the London Film Festival it brought us two British films with related subjects: Almost Adult, a tale of refugee children and Ghosts, a film about economic migrants from, arguably the doyen of documentaries, Nick Broomfield.

Almost Adult is both a sensitive and stark film. It tells the story of Mamie (Victoire Milandu), a girl from the ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo, who is legally almost adult when she arrives in the UK at 17 years old. As long as she is seen as a child in the eyes of the law, legislation grants her the temporary right to be in Britain. What it doesn't do effectively is protect her whilst she's here. Almost Adult shows the failure to implement a system of care that will safeguard refugee children arriving on these shores, alone and traumatised. This is the bigger, dryer and true story that frames the representative, smaller and fictional narrative of Mamie.

From the film's first frames we are confronted with the direct gaze of Mamie, looking down the camera lens and out at us - 'this is my story', she tells us. This is a simple, arresting and engaging technique. We're so used to both actors and interviewees looking just to the left or right of camera, addressing someone who isn't us. Of course Mamie is neither an actor nor an interviewee. She is Victoire Milandu, a real refugee playing the part of a fictional refugee. Mamie has elements of Victoire, but she is a composite image; a collage of extensively researched refugee experiences that have been unified in a single narrative by writer Rona Munro.

Having been abused by her male traffickers and abandoned by her frightened sister, Mamie reaches England alone and finds the streets glister not with gold but with rain. Here she encounters many different faces, English and refugee, exploitative and caring. And she meets Shiku, a younger girl whom she 'adopts' as her new sister. Shiku is from Kenya and speaks a different language, but they are bound by a need for family and by their shared, silent histories of abuse. They are babes in the wood, orphaned and abandoned by those who should take responsibility for them. This fairytale parallel - so appropriate for a film about the rights of children - is brought to the surface when, in an English Language class, Mamie tells the tale of Hansel and Gretel.

Unlike the most Grimm of fairytales, Almost Adult takes us through a dark country but ultimately deposits us on a safe shore. It does this by proving that truth is at least as strange, and fortuitous, as fiction. It is easy for refugees to lose their identity. Initially for Mamie this means sliding into ghost-realm of non-existence, but at the last it allows her to slip into a new life.

Ghosts is a less hopeful film. Shot by Michael Winterbottom's regular cinematographer, Marcel Zyskind, it has a strong flavour of Winterbottom's style. Nick Broomfield does not make his usual on-screen appearance as the hands-on director and the film is stripped of the sensationalism and star-turns of many of Broomfield's documentaries. This is also his first film to focus on non-white and non-English speaking characters. The narrative deals with the Chinese cockle-pickers, drowned in Morecombe Bay on February 5th 2004. It foregrounds the event itself, opening with location shots of the slate-grey bay and fast encroaching waters, and it turns full circle to present us again with the dark sea at its close. But the centre of the film gives us a back-story to the news event. It gives faces to some of the 23 who died. It's a fictionalised narrative, founded in fact.

We follow Ai Qin, a name borne by both the character and the person playing her. They share certain experiences, but not all. Both are young Chinese women and single mothers, but the real Ai Qin is not a survivor of Morecombe Bay. The Ai Qin we follow has her home in the agrarian Fujian Province. Here rural workers will earn just £30 a month, but she wants more for her son. She leaves her home, parents, son, language and identity behind her and buys passage out of China to the UK, becoming an economic migrant. Her aim is simple: to live in Britain for a short time, earn good money and return home. What she finds is a hellish journey across land and sea, smuggled in screwed-shut containers. And what she enters into is a chain of exploitation and coercion - one that is not simply divided along racial lines. She lives in a squalid suburban house along with a dozen other Chinese migrants in Thetford, Norfolk. Her rent is milked straight from her pay packet. She is told by her Chinese boss Mr Li, 'You are nothing. An Illegal. Fake first name, fake surname.'

Where Almost Adult employs imagery - incorporating white flowers and yellow light as motifs of memory - and using more traditionally filmic techniques to tell its story, Ghosts is shot like an observational documentary. It mocks up the ever-watchful camera-eye, appearing to catch a story as it organically spills forth. From the shot that lingers a little too long, waiting for a face to betray further emotion, to the artfully artless use of scenes filmed into window-light. Here the protagonists appear as virtual silhouettes, colour knocked out of them by grey light flooding from behind. This is a classic visual of the fly-on-the-wall documentary, where a scene unfurls quickly before the camera and there's no time to reposition for a better view. For Ghosts the effect, if not the process behind it, is replicated perfectly.

Almost Adult and Ghosts deal with similar and tricky topics - the outsider, the failure of the law to protect the vulnerable, the fragility of identity and the deficits and balances of human caring. By casting a 'real' person as the lead, someone with a life experience comparable to that of the character they play, both films radiate a discomforting level of credibility. They are not necessarily truer or more affecting than a more fictional work, but they do walk a step closer to us and fuzz the boundary between the screen and the audience. They jolt you with the shock of the real, whilst using drama to show you things that a documentary could only tell you.