Would anyone miss you? Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. Her body wasnt 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 Joyces 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. Read more …
A unique, if slightly disjointed, film, which speaks volumes about the profound mysteries of other people’s lives.
Morley’s documentary is as much about our own fears and conditions of connection, as it is about a woman who slipped from sight.
This barely conceivable story of neglect and loneliness is given heartbreaking new life by Morley, with Zawe Ashton standing in effectively for the tragic young singer.
Carol Morley’s docudrama is a compelling, compassionate mix of imaginative reconstructions, shrewdly chosen songs and interviews with Joyce’s ex-partners, friends and colleagues.
Hard to recall a film that lodges in the memory quite like this. Unmissable.
Watching it is an almost claustrophobic experience, but a very powerful and moving one.
Putting the particulars of Joyce’s life on screen was Morley’s boldest gambit, but I’m afraid it backfires, because it’s a faked-up life we can’t ever square with what we’re hearing. Neither dream nor séance, it makes the film mutate into something dangerously self-serving – closer to an art project.
This is a painfully sad portrait of an atomised society in which people may slip through the cracks into oblivion, but more haunting still are the unresolved personal mysteries.
It is necessarily incomplete but still constructs a haunting portrait of a woman who deserved a better life and death.
Here’s a compassionate, haunting and tragic film with a desperately sad seasonal twist that makes it almost unbearably poignant viewing.
What's missing is the participation of her family who, perhaps understandably, refused to be interviewed. This means the insight into her life is fleeting at best.
Riveting to watch and revealing to ponder long after it ends.
A film to haunt you for all the right reasons.
'Dreams of a Life': The ghost of Christmas not so long past
Carol Morley interview
Dreams of a Life: interview with director Carol Morley
A life lived alone in a city of millions
Carol Morley's film about isolation inspires connections
Cameo, Edinburgh from Friday December 16, 2011, until Thursday December 29, 2011. More info: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/
Edinburgh Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday January 6, 2012, until Thursday January 12, 2012. More info: www.filmhousecinema.com
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