Dreams of a Life Screening and Introduction by Alice May Williams

To coincide with Jerwood/FVU Awards exhibition ‘Borrowed Time’ CCA will screen Dreams of a Life (2011) by Carol Morley. As a nominee for the 2016 award, filmmaker Alice May Williams introduces her work and influences alongside a screening of Morely’s first feature length documentary.

Dreams of a Life interweaves imagined scenes from the life of Joyce Vincent who died in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London in 2003. What was remarkable about her death was that her body wasn’t discovered for three years, surrounded by Christmas presents she had been wrapping, and with the TV still on.

Significant to Alice is the way Morley tells stories through ‘collaging together different material and voices to build a sense of something rather than a straightforward factual account’. She works with these techniques to explore forms of knowledge that are based on feeling.

‘This has been very influential on my research towards the film about Battersea Power Station - which I was unable to access due to the development - and also when I was making the film about my Great Great Grandmother. I only had very scant facts and snippets about her, from which I wanted to build a bigger picture, bring back to life the person who was already dead. Much like Morley does in Dreams of a Life, which as its title suggests, is so much more about understanding a fairly ordinary life than speculating about her rather unusual death.' - Alice May Williams