dreams of a life

In 2006 Joyce Vincent, aged 40, was found dead in her flat in Wood Green, north London. She died of natural causes. The tv and lights had been left on. There was a pile of Christmas presents she had been wrapping. An ocean of unpaid bills had stacked up in the hallway. Joyce Vincent's dead body had lain there for three years.


How could this have happened? How could her dissapearance have gone unoticed? The story came and went in the press. Filmmaker Carol Morley, was particularly moved by it, so much so that she set out to make a documentary to piece together who this woman was, and how this could have happened. The film is called Dreams of a Life.



When you hear the story of Joyce Vincent, you may be driven to demand why her friends and family did not step in sooner, to note why she had so long been away. What Dreams of a Life makes clear, is Joyce was the kind of woman who kept a part of herself from everyone, who liked to keep up appearances, who did not want to be known.

Zawe Ashton, the actress who gives a captivating performance in the beautifully shot dramatisations in the film says "It's such a difficult thing for women, especially, to admit when we're not coping, because we're supposed to be all right with all the different roles we're born with and are piled on us later on," she says. "You're always supposed to be managing, and I suppose I let myself imagine what it would be like not to cope."

For those of us who move from suburbs and small towns to the cities, one of the elements that drives us to the city, is to cast aside the restrictions of small town mentality. We escape the village that is aware of our entire history, knows our every movement, a place where all of our actions have faced constant comment and scrutiny. The city, and the anonymity it provides, gives us new scope for privacy and space. Here we can choose what we reveal and to whom, all on our own terms. (The only exception perhaps being when one becomes a celebrity, but as most of us are not celebrities, this is hardly a general problem.)

Having moved away from our villages, we find we miss certain aspects of them and recreate them, whether they be through work, or through places we frequent with regularity, or within scenes and subcultures. We also miss and need certain aspects of the families we've left, and so create a new family through our friends.

This new family come without the life long shared histories that can strain, that can question changes. The new family, the one born of friends accepts us at our current state, fully formed. They are there for us when we need them, they are more understanding than family can be when we do not, when we choose to slip away.



But as much as we muddle the anonymity the city brings by creating new families of friends and new villages within cities, we are also here to have the option of that anonymity, to make use of when we choose. Having lived in London for most of my adult life, I feel the option for this anonymity there most acutely.

When people tell me they could never live in a city as big as London or New York or Berlin, afraid of being lost in the size of it, I often answer it is exactly for that size that I love the city. While it is true that if I walk around certain areas and places in Hackney and Shoreditch that I have frequented for years, I am likely to run into someone, simply crossing the town to west London, I might as well be another world away.

London, like any major city, is a place where people are busy and move at a rapid pace. It is not unusual to not see a close friend for months at a time. People get caught up with "life" , with the constant struggling juggle of work, romantic relationships (or the seeking of one), family, and friendships.

Sometimes we manage to juggle better than others. When you don't see someone you like for a while, you assume they are busy, they are away, they will get in touch when they can. We can also fall out of sync, go back and forth with oneself or one's friend being busy, never both being available at the same time.

But it is so much more easier now to be connected you may say!If you don't have the time to visit, to call, you can still keep up with people via social media, comment on someone's picture in a way that says, we are still connected, we are still involved. and then when the time comes we can meet up, or not, because the other thing is, more levels of connection are available now than ever before.

I used to be a big advocate of the above sentiment. And I do still think the varied ways we have of keeping in contact are great. Home is often a complicated question. I have friends and family that are dear to me across the globe. I've been in a few long distance relationships and have had to find different ways to stay connected.

What I've learned is: yes all these additional forms of contact certainly help, but fundamentally, nothing can ever take the place of face time. For a relationship to progress all the social media and skype and even phone calls will never be enough.

In cities we live apart from one another. Never more so when we live alone. I have lived alone for years, in London and Berlin. It is rare when I've known my neighbors, and when I say I've known them: I mean I say hi to them in the hall. I have lived for years next door to people who I would never invite into my home, who have never invited me to theirs, who I might not notice if months pass and I don't see them, and even if I did notice there absence, I probably wouldn't think much of it.


Perhaps it is notable that Joyce Vincent died in a time before social media had become pervasive as it is now. Perhaps then even as she was a private person, who would sometimes fall from contact, a lack of her online presence would be noticed.
More likely however, is that people would assume she was on to other things, or not using social media anymore.




I have no desire to go back to a time when I lived in a suburb and our archetypical nosy neighbor (ours was a woman who lived across the street) would come by and knock at our door at anything she deemed suspicious. So please do not think I am in any way romanticising the concept of the small town. However, there is a trade off to living in a place where one does not ever question the movements of ones neighbor, with fear of being invasive. If someone does not have close friends, if someone is single, if someone is no longer close to their family (which is often the case of those who move to the city) it is much easier to go unnoticed than any of us would care to admit.


The truly poignant thing to me in watching Dreams of a life, was not a sense of "How strange for this to happen" but more "How likely this is" because whatever you say, if you live in a city, and you haven't seen a friend in a while, particularly if the friend is the kind known for dissapearing from time to time, (and I think many of us have friends like this), the chances of most of us going round their house to see if they are alive are pretty slim.

Maybe you might call them after time, or write them, or ask after friends in common, but even then, this is not the kind of thing you think would happen. You are more likely to invent reasons why they are too busy. Which in the case of Joyce Vincent, is exactly what happened.

There is also something about her being a woman, about her being by all accounts a very attractive, sexually appealing woman. It is almost as if her attractiveness and inherent glamour enhanced the distance between those who knew her. It is as if they felt something bad could never happen to someone as alluring as her. There are preconceptions that for someone to go missing, they must be introverted, visually unappealing, when actually the act of being outgoing can also be a mask, a far more powerful one.

Maybe the other thing is, for those we lose touch with, those that we like, in some way the idea of the friend and friendship lives on in our head. We like to imagine they are going on and living well and that at some point we will meet again and pick up where we left off. Or that even if we don't meet, at the very least we like to think that they are well.

But by not making the effort to maintain contact, whether we like to admit it or not,we hamper our ties with the friend. Friendship, like any other relationship, demands effort and care. We choose to forget this at times, and when we learn of bad news of a former friend, we our plagued with regret . This happened to me recently, and it is a complicated thing to grieve.




Dreams of a life is a heartbreaking and poignant documentary , that makes a strong comment on relationships in contemporary urban society. It leaves us with more questions of answers, but manages a powerful task: that of commemorating an elliptical real life character, who thankfully to the film, will now never be forgotten.


An exclusive screening of Dreams of a Life followed by a discussion and Q&A with Director, Carol Morley, and leading actress Zawe Ashton will be taking place at the Babylon Kino in Mitte on Monday 13th February. This event is the second in a series of events in english for Berlin Black History Month .Limited advance tickets can be reserved here.