Carol Morley’s Dreams of a Life, starring Zawe Ashton is getting its UK release date pushed forward to December 16th. The move is due in part to its successful premiere and public screenings at this year’s London Film Festival.We first brought the story to Shadow And Act readers in May and most recently earlier this month. For those of you who may have missed our past write-ups about the film and the grim true story it’s based upon, check out this brief synopsis and clip…

The official synopsis…

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.

Who was she? And how could this happen to someone in our day and age- the so-called age of communication? For her film Dreams of a Life, filmmaker Carol Morley set out to find out. Joyce may have died in tragic isolation, but Morley was not going to let her be forgotten. She placed adverts in newspapers, on the Internet, and on the side of a London taxi. What she finds out is extraordinary.

A range of people that once knew Joyce help to piece together a portrait of the woman that became so forgotten. “She was very sweet, beautiful looking, a bit of a mystery. We weren’t too sure where she came from. It’s almost like she was a ghost, even then.” Dreams of a Life becomes as much about the people who remember her as it is about Joyce herself.

(H/T: EC Forde)