Nominated for The Grierson Award for Best Documentary at London Film Festival 2011
Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. Her body wasn’t discovered for three years, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on.
Director Carol Morley, determined to find out more about Joyce’s life, spent five years tracking down those who knew her by placing adverts in newspapers, on black cabs and on the internet.
Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce’s life (played brilliantly by exciting new talent Zawe Ashton) Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest. It is not only a portrait of Joyce, but a portrait of London in the eighties – the City, music and race. It is a film about urban lives, contemporary life and how, like Joyce, we are all different things to different people.
