Evening Standard

Carol Morley talks to Nick Roddick about her extrordinary docudrama about the woman found in a Wood Green flat three years after her death with the TV still on.

The day I arrange to meet film-maker Carol Morley, at the 55th BFI London Film Festival flagship cinema, the mighty Odeon Leicester Square is teaming with PR people, TV crews and film makers. Several interviews are going on simulatneously. Outside, Westminster Council has decided that this would be a good time to redesign Leicester Square so cranes, diggers and several pneumatic drills are nosily at work on the task.

So I am worried about whether I will be able to hear what she has to say about her extrordinary new film, Dreams of a life. But Morley, whose feature Edge screened at last year’s LFF, reassures me “don’t worry” she says, “I’m quite loud.”

Indeed, whatever other interesting colours maybe streaked into her short blonde hair, shrinking violet is not on of them.

Dreams of a life is a docudrama about a macabre footnote to london’s history: on 26th January 2006, the body of a woman was found in a bedsit above Wood Green Shopping Centre. The TV was on as were the lights and the heating. When the bailiffs broke in (the rent was seriously in arrears)they discovered Joyce Carol Vincent. She had been dead for three years. Her Skeleton, said one observer, had crumbled away into a dusty outline which seemed to ‘melt into the carpet’

Morley, the younger sister of musical journalist Paul Morley, came across the story when she picked up a copy of the Sun on the tube.‘There was no picture of Joyce, just one of the bedsit.’. she says ‘I became obsessed with it. They had her down as 40 (she was actually 38) and that was all. They didn’t mention whether she was black or white – there was nothing. What fascinated me was that, when they found the skeleton, it was apparent that she had been wrapping Christmas presents when she died.

Morley placed and ad on the side of a london taxi, another in the Evening Standard, and finally began to piece together Joyce’s life, interviewing thise that had known her. The result, that took the tenacious film-maker five years to put together – goes way beyond repportage.It’s a personal history that almost unbelievably manages to be heartbreaking, life affirming, funny and scarey while at the same time offering a disturbing portrait of modern life.

‘I suppose it looked like a story where nobody cared,’ says Morley ‘And it also looked like a story about somebody you might not bother caring about.’

‘People were blogging, “she must have been a miserable bitch!” But actually it’s the opposite of that: the reason she had been neglected for three years was not that she was awful and that people didn’t care about her: they all thought that she was off having a better life than they were.’

Dreams of a life skillfully mixes interviews with the people who knew and loved Joyce – In particular an early boyfriend, Martin, who has a habit of laughing nervously at the end of an answer – with home-movie footage, photographs and extensive re-enactments in which Joyce is played with great delicacy by up-and -coming actress Zawe Ashton.

not producing the expected downbeat chronicle of a death unforetold was important to Morley. ‘I always felt I didn’t want to wallow in grimness,’ she says ‘I’m not that sort of person. There’s definitely humour in it and in the characters she met. As i got to know her and them, i realised it was as much about them as it was about her. It sounds a bit corney, but I think it’s a celebrates her life rather her death.

Dreams of a life doesn’t solve the mystery of Joyce’s death, but what makes the film so unforgetable is the fact that it forces us to think about how delicate a thing identity can be. ‘The major theme of the film for me is disconnection and connection,’ says Morley,‘I think it tells a story about our age, because we live in an era where we are all supposedly so connected through technology. that was why I was passionate to make the film. Wierdly, she lived above a huge shopping centre that about a quarter of a million people go to every week. i do think it’s a very modern story, that somebody could be so isolated in such an age.’

Dreams of a life is showing at the 55th London Film Fetstival and has been nominated for the Grierson Award.