In this chapter I will revisit Carol Morley's 2011 film Dreams of a Life and approach it from the perspective of contemporary feminist ethics, drawing on intersectional feminism and the ethics of care. Morley's film focuses on Joyce Vincent, a woman whose decomposed body was found on the sofa in her flat in Wood Green, north-east London, above the ‘Shopping City’ centre, in 2006, nearly three years after she had died. The electricity supply was still connected, with the television still on, mounds of post lay by the door, and a collection of wrapped but unlabelled Christmas presents surrounded the woman's body. The story of Joyce's death was met with shock in Britain at the time and was perceived as evidence of the disconnected London lives being led in the noughties. Critical reception of the film focused on the film's perceived message as being that we should check on our friends and family, and not lose touch with people. Many critics described how, despite failing to solve the mystery of what happened to Joyce Vincent, the film actually told a ‘universal’ story about loneliness and modern society.

In this chapter, I will shift the emphasis of the film back onto Joyce Vincent, and argue that the film enacts an intersectional feminist ethics of care, taking into account Joyce's specific social identity in terms of race, gender and class. Further, I will argue that Morley's pursuit of the project can be looked at in light of an ethics of recognition of Joyce's story, rather than an attempt to ‘solve’ it, and that Zawe Ashton's performance as ‘Joyce’ in the film's powerful and affecting reconstruction scenes can be viewed as an embodied performance of care. I thereby seek to reposition the film in relation to contemporary feminist ethics, rather than consigning it to the status of an urban cautionary tale or inadequate investigative documentary. In assessing the ethics of the film as a gesture of care, it is important to consider Morley's motivations for making the film, and the process which she undertook to compile the film's contents. This will enable us to assess whether the project was undertaken as a gesture of care towards Joyce, in line with the recognition that Joyce was a person who existed in ‘mutually interconnected, interdependent, and often unequal relations with each other’ (Hankivsky 2014: 252).