The year is 2040 and the world’s economic wealth has shifted to Asia. After a series of economic catastrophes, Europe and North America are wastelands full of desperate people, eking out an existence doing the dangerous, poorly paid jobs no-one in Asia wants to do anymore.
This is the premise for Ghosts With Shit Jobs, a KickStarter-backed mockumentary. Made on a limited budget and with few special effects, this is a well-acted, thoughtful comedy that proves you can do a lot with very little indeed.
Ghosts With Shit Jobs presents itself as a documentary made for Chinese audiences, telling four stories about the working poor in North America. There’s plenty here that questions the paternalism of many such TV shows made today, about how people live and work in Asia.
Of the four stories, Serina (Rachel MacMillan) working as “human spam,” she is paid digitally for dropping product placements into real world conversations and Oscar (Sean Lerner), a “digital janitor” blurring out logos in a Google-Maps style virtual reality are the most winsome and comically worthy.
At times, Ghosts With Shit Jobs feels like watching a stage performance; actors mimic using minority report style screens and computer interfaces. But, if you can get past this distraction (and often its no more than a distraction) you will enjoy a fascinating, dark, funny and quite original Sci-Fi parable.
