It was when writer and director Carol Morley read an article
in the Sun newspaper that carried the haunting headline “Woman lays dead for three years” that she became intrigued.
On 25 January 2006, officials from a
north London housing association
repossessing a bedsit overlooking the busy Wood Green Shopping City owing to
rent arrears made a grim discovery. Lying on the sofa was the skeleton of a
38-year-old woman who had been dead for almost three years. In a corner of the
room the television set was still on, tuned to BBC1, and a small pile of newly
wrapped Christmas presents lay on the floor. Washing up was heaped in the
kitchen sink and a mountain of post lay behind the front door. Food in the
refrigerator was marked with 2003 expiry dates. The dead woman's body was so
badly decomposed comparing dental records with an old holiday photograph of her
smiling was the only way to identify it[1]. This
was the body of Joyce Carol Vincent.
It took Carol Morley five years to
research and make her first documentary feature film Dreams of a Life (2011) about
a young woman of which so little was originally known. She placed adverts in newspapers,
the internet and even placed one on London’s black taxi cabs to find people who
knew this friendly good looking sexy young women who so easily became a
forgotten person. Eventually friends and colleges gradually came forward, but
not her four sisters who wanted to remain anonymous, and it’s these people who the
director skillfully interviews to give us a framework to Joyce Vincent’s short existence.
Morley also gives us reconstructed elements of her life showing the very young
schoolgirl (Alix Luka-Cain) with her mother and father and the older Joyce who
is convincingly played by Zawe Ashton, we also get to witness the Wood Green
flat in which the body was found.
This film raises many fundamental questions including how
easy it is to get lost in a crowded city and how this vibrant young women can
disappear without her so called boyfriends, family and wide circle of friends
appearing to care. Where were the local authorities and utility companies that
let the outstanding bills mount up for three years while a lonely corpse was
allowed to rot? This must be one of the most heartbreakingly depressing but eye
opening documentary films I have ever seen and one which evokes the true
meaning of Christmas for many people: loneliness. The bright lights are not
always as attractive as they seem?
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