With so many hybrid docs challenging the sensibilities of fans and filmmakers and blurring the lines of fiction/non-fiction storytelling, there’s an exciting sense of growth in the language of this particular brand cinema. I’m really enjoying all of the experimentation going on and look forward those films that have fun breaking the rules and indulge in the tropes of genre filmmaking. ‘Dreams of a Life’ looks to be another interesting fusion of fiction filmmaking techniques and non-fiction storytelling. Director Carol Morley mixes talking head interviews with re-enactments based on the diary entries of the main character. Here’s they synopsis:

Would anyone miss you? 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.

Interweaving interviews with imagined scenes from Joyce’s life, Dreams of a Life is an imaginative, powerful, multilayered quest, and is not only a portrait of Joyce but a portrait of London in the eighties—the City, music, and race. It is a film about urban lives, contemporary life, and how, like Joyce, we are all different things to different people. It is about how little we may ever know each other, but nevertheless, how much we can love.

Apparently the film comes out today! Unfortunately, it’s only screening in the UK. I guess I’ll have to wait to hear about this one from my UK friends! Check out the film’s official website for screening dates and more info on the film. Very excited to see this.