NOBODY noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in Wood Green, north London, in 2003.
Her body - sat on the sofa surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping - wasn't discovered until three years later. The TV was still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life, not even a photograph.
Who was she? And how could this happen to someone in our so-called age of communication?
For her new film Dreams of a Life, filmmaker Carol Morley set out to find out. Joyce may have died in tragic isolation, but Morley was not going to let her be forgotten - and what she found out was extraordinary.
With her detective work far more successful than that of the police and council authorities, Carol traced Joyce's friends, colleagues and ex-boyfriends through ads in the local press, on black cabs and via online social networks.
In candid conversations with them, and using dramatised reconstructions with actress Zawe Ashton portraying Joyce, Carol Morley pieced together the life of a woman who was lively and social and yet remained detached and distant from all who knew and loved her.
A range of people who once knew Joyce help to piece together a moving portrait of the woman that became so forgotten: "She was very sweet, beautiful looking, a bit of a mystery. We weren't too sure where she came from. It's almost like she was a ghost, even then."
Five years in the making, Dreams of a Life is released in cinemas by UK independent distributor Dogwoof on December 16.
Carol Morley came to prominence with her 2000 documentary The Alcohol Years, a BAFTA-nominated memoir of early 80s Manchester.
Morley's first narrative feature film Edge - made on a micro budget - premiered at The London Film Festival in 2010 and is due for a January 2012 release. Dreams of a Life is her first documentary feature film.
Read More...
[Source: Coventry Telegraph - The Geek Files]
No comments:
Post a Comment