Screened as part of NZIFF 2012

Dreams of a Life 2011

Directed by Carol Morley

Haunting behind-the-headlines portrait of the life of vivacious London woman Joyce Vincent, whose disappearance went unnoticed for almost three years. “Riveting to watch and revealing to ponder long after it ends.” — The Observer

Ireland / UK In English
95 minutes HDCAM

Director

Producers

Cairo Cannon
,
James Mitchell

Photography

Mary Farbrother
,
Lynda Hall

Editor

Chris Wyatt

Costume designer

Leonie Prendergast

Music

Barry Adamson

With

Zawe Ashton (Joyce)
,
Alix Luka-Cain (young Joyce)
,
Cornell S. John (father)
,
Neelam Bakshi (mother)
,
Alistair Abrahams
,
Mandy Allen
,
Prue Almond
,
Kim Bacon
,
Daniel Roberts
,
William Barthorpe
,
Alison Campsie
,
Catherine Clarke

Festivals

London 2011

Elsewhere

The discovery of the decomposed remains of Joyce Vincent, aged 38, in a flat above a North London shopping centre in 2006 brought headlines heavy with the morbid implications of urban anonymity. She had died almost three years earlier surrounded by Christmas shopping; the heating and the TV set were still on, her hallway heaped with junk mail. Fascinated by Joyce’s story, filmmaker Carol Morley (The Alcohol Years) launched a wide-scale search for the friends, lovers, acquaintances and family that the tabloids had failed to flush out. Her film is a skilful assembly of subsequent interviews with the willing and dramatisations of speculated key events. The Joyce glimpsed in these sometimes contradictory accounts is no bedsit spinster cliché but a vital, attractive woman whose identity seems to have shifted as she moved from crowd to crowd; in other words, a distinctly and disturbingly metropolitan creature. — BG

“The details accumulate and fascinate… Carol Morley has given Joyce Vincent, in a bizarre, compelling, even loving way, a second life.” — Nigel Andrews, Financial Times