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
Five years in the making, riveting to watch and revealing to ponder long after it ends.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2012
Dreams of a Life 2011
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