Dreams of a Life

Zawe Ashton as Joyce Vincent

Dreams of a Life A film by Carol Morley. A film about Joyce Vincent

Nobody noticed when thirty-eight year old Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. When her skeleton was discovered three years later, her heating and her television were still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of Joyce’s life- not even a photograph.

Who was Joyce Vincent? And how could this happen to someone in our day and age the so-called age of communication? Dreams of a Life is Carol Morley’s quest to discover who Joyce was and how she came to be so forgotten.

Joyce Vincent

Morley places adverts in newspapers, on the Internet and on the side of a London taxi and discovers Joyce’s former friends, lovers and colleagues. Their testimonies, together with re-imagined scenes from Joyce’s life, form a multilayered portrait of Joyce, and an insight into the world she inhabited.

Dreams of a Life is about a life lived in modern times. It is a film about Joyce Vincent and a film about ourselves; about how much and yet how little we may ever know each other.

Click here to read the interview with Director Carol Morley.

Dreams of a Life
Cast: Zawe Ashton – Joyce
Alix Luka-Cain -Young Joyce This is Alix’s film debut.
Cornell S John – Father
UK Release Date: 16 December, 2011 Running time: 90 mins


Dreams of a Life