Dreams of a Life

2011 • 90 minutes

About this movie

Would anyone miss you? Nobody noticed when Joyce Vincent died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. Her body wasn't discovered for three years, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on. Newspaper reports offered few details of her life - not even a photograph. Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce's life, Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest, and is not only a portrait of Joyce but a portrait of London in the eighties the City, music, and race. It is a film about urban lives, contemporary life, and how, like Joyce, we are all different things to different people. It is about how little we may ever know each other, but nevertheless, how much we can love. - 2011 Channel Four Television, The British Film Institute, Dogwoof.

Ratings and reviews

I watched this because of the Steven Wilson album, "Hand. Cannot. Erase". It's obviously a fascinating tale, largely composed of unanswered questions and speculative theorising about the course of Joyce's life. As good as Zawe Ashton is, I felt the dramatised parts tried to push an interpretation on the viewer too much, whereas the talking heads are much more interesting and powerful. Not all of their viewpoints align, and the film maker is very adept at putting the contrasting ones back to back to highlight the unreliability or perhaps partiality of witnesses to our lives. (It's notable that some of the participants here appear to be projecting themselves on to their narrative of Joyce at times.) The contribution from her first ex- is especially poignant. It does make you wonder, maybe not so much how a tragedy like this can happen (I'd say it's a higher probability in places like London), but how one's own life might be summarised and analysed by those who would claim to 'know' you.

To Rio Rio Rio to too h