15 March | 7.15pm | 1 hr 35 mins | £4
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, Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life starring Zawe Ashton, 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.
We asked actor Zawe Ashton a few Qs about Dreams of a Life:
In a nutshell, what can we expect from your show/film/event?
Dreams of a Life is a film that took Carol Morley seven years to get financed and made. It’s an incredible story of the disappearance of a woman in to the cracks of our society and also an extraordinary example of Carol’s tenacity and commitment as a female filmmaker to bring female narratives to the screen in the way she wanted to. As a documentary-feature with dramatised elements, it’s also a really exciting hybrid in terms of form and storytelling in the documentary genre.
Why do you think we need Wo! show and tell festival?
It’s so important to keep the framework of female issues being human issues. Creating art and events for the public and encouraging the conversation around what affects women in our society today is exactly the way that we need to engage awareness.
Any words of advice to your fellow humans today?
“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
-Audre Lorde