Ghosts

Is any real documentary footage included in the film?
Only right at the end where Aiqin Lin meets her son again, she’d not been home for eight years and that was her real son who didn’t recognise her at all. We shot this with a much smaller camera, to try to be a bit more inconspicuous. We did have some surveillance footage but I found it pulled you out of the narrative so we took it out – it made it seem like two different films.

When you see the happiness of life in China compared to conditions here, you wonder what drives the Chinese to come here in the first place. I don’t think they have a lot of choice – all government subsidies have gone, so the peasant economy in China has vanished. People can’t survive on a few chickens and rice; they have to pay for their children to go to kindergarten, and for medical help. Whole generations of Chinese children are being brought up by grandparents, while their parents are here, or in Australia or Germany etc. Some villages have no parents at all, they are completely supported by people overseas. The immigrants are very loyal to their families back in China even though they often remarry here.