26/03/12……Dreams of Life at Thame Cinema

THIS Saturday – March 31; Thame Cinema 4 All, Players Theatre, Nelson Street, Thame. Dreams of Life – UK 2011, 90 minutes, 12A certificate, Directed by Carol Morley, Starring Zawe Ashton.

One day in 2006, documentary film maker, Carol Morley, happened upon a tragic story in a London newspaper. The body of 30-something year-old Joyce Vincent had been discovered in her bedsit in North London by council officials in search of rent arrears.

She had been dead for three years, the television still tuned to BBC1, her body surrounded by recently wrapped Christmas presents. It was impossible after such a length of time to establish how she had died. Her absence from this world went unnoticed and unmissed by anyone who knew her. The story intrigued Morley. This was not someone with notable substance misuse problems, nor was she someone with no social circle ? on the contrary, Vincent was attractive and sociable, someone who mixed in cosmopolitan circles on the fringes of the music business, with aspirations for a recording career.

In an attempt to answer some of the many questions the story raised about lonely people in big cities, Morley took it upon herself to become Joyce?s biographer, assembling through dogged research the testimonies of those who knew her, people who might be able to account for the person she was, what she was like, how she lived, what she aspired to. The film is partly an attempt to bear witness to Vincent?s life and death, but it is also a harsh critique of the kind of complacent and heartless society that makes it possible for someone living a breath away from so many people to be so comprehensively alone.

When reviewing this film at the London Film Festival, Guardian journalist Peter Bradshaw wrote: ?It lingered persistently in my mind, and it lingers still, like a melody of desperate sadness.? Gripping and very powerful.

This Saturday 31st March; doors open 7.30, film starts 8pm; Admission