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.

Carol Morley came to prominence with her documentary The Alcohol Years, a BAFTA nominated, Grierson Awarded, festival-winning film that was later released on DVD to critical acclaim. The film masqueraded as an autobiography but became as much about the people in it as Morley herself - and was seen to define an era (the 80’s) and a place (Manchester). An artist-filmmaker, she has received a number of Arts Council awards and made films that challenge, in different ways, how stories are told and which often cross the boundaries between fact and fiction. Her work has been shown at major international festivals, at galleries, cinemas, on Channel 4, Film4 and has received many international broadcasts, including The Sundance Channel. She has been the recipient of the Arts Foundation Fellowship for documentary film. Morley’s first narrative feature film Edge - made on a micro budget - was premiered at The London Film Festival in 2010 and released in 2012. Dreams of a Life is her first documentary feature film.