When documentary maker Carol Morley picked up a copy of The Sun while on the Tube one day, she probably wasn’t expecting to find a story that would pre-occupy her for the next five years. However, the extraordinary story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman who was found in her council bedsit three years after her death surrounded by half wrapped Christmas presents and with the television still on, was too compelling to ignore.
“Over the next couple of days I was trying to see if anything else came out about the story and there was very little. The press never got a photograph of her. Then some people in chat rooms and blogs began writing that she must have been one miserable bitch that no one noticed that she was missing and that she probably deserved the domestic abuse that had been mentioned in the article. At that point I felt that that cannot be somebody’s legacy really, that someone should make a tribute or elegiac piece to Joyce,” said Morley.
With so little information available, Morley set about tracking down Joyce’s family and friends to find out what happened to her. What emerges is the story of someone who was much loved by her friends but whose transitory lifestyle meant that the often lost touch with her for long periods of time. And when she died, nobody noticed.
“I felt that I had got to the bottom of it in some ways when I realised that the reason that she was there for so long without anyone realising was precisely because everybody thought she was off having a better life than they were… In a way it has become more a film about friendship. It is ignored in society, how powerful friendship is, and there aren’t many films about it. What I love about the film is that instead of being a film about blame or accusation, it actually becomes a film about people celebrating Joyce’s life but also feeling guilt and regret,” she said.
Morely uses a mix of interviews with friends and interested parties and reconstructions, with Zawe Ashton playing Joyce, to tell her story. Music plays a major role in the film, just as it did in Joyce’s life, with the film’s most powerful and pivotal scene a shot of Ashton singing “My Smile is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down” in front of the bedroom mirror.
“Joyce wanted to be a singer and loved music. It was an important part of her life and in a way I wanted to give Joyce her voice back away from this headline in the Sun and this dreary stuff written on chatroom sites. I wanted to give her a sense of having once lived by bringing an actor into it who could touch on the emotional and inner life of Joyce rather than merely stating the facts or other people’s opinions or ideas about her,” said Morley.
For those who see the film, it serves as a profound reminder that despite all our connections through social media and so on, what happened to Joyce could very easily happen to any of us.
“A lot of people are leaving the cinema and phoning somebody up, a friend or a relative, and some people are inviting people around to their home because they feel they don’t know them enough. It is making people think of not only themselves and their circumstances but also of other people and that is really a powerful thing. It is not like I started out to make a film that would make people connect or think about modern life but that has been the response,” she said.
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