About Us
Dreams Of A Life
95 mins / 2011 / England / Director: Carol Morley
Cast: Zawe Ashton, Neelam Bakshi, Jonathan Harden
Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old 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. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life– not even a photograph.
Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce’s life, Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest, and 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. It is about how little we may ever know each other, but nevertheless, how much we can love.
To create this insightful portrait, filmmaker Carol Morley placed adverts in newspapers, on the internet and on the side of a London taxi, and spoke to those who had know Vincent. What she found out was in many ways extraordinary, and in other ways very ordinary.
“Haunting, compassionate and inventive”
“A bold, complex approach to documentary filmmaking”
“A compelling, compassionate mix, Dreams speaks volumes about the mysteries of other people’s lives”