4 Talent Extra
Every year in the UK, there are some funerals which are attended by no-one. Emily Ford hears how Lucy Cohen went searching for stories of the unmourned dead to find out how, in a world of social networking, people are still dying alone.
Lucy Cohen's first television documentary is one she never thought she'd make. The director, recipient of a commission from First Cut, says she favours "simple, observational filming, living and breathing with people... engaging with memories and experiences." Strange, then, that her directorial debut is anything but.
Watch Me Disappear explores the stories of two people who died alone and unnoticed. One of their bodies was not found for several weeks; the other remained unnoticed for a year. And although one case ended with a family funeral, the other's was unattended as no-one could be found. "It's far more authored than anything I'd done before," says Lucy.
Lucy, 27, cuts a small, unassuming figure. She speaks slowly, dreamily, looking around at no one in particular as she peels the sticker off her beer bottle. "I was thinking about whether it would be possible to find someone that no one knows, in this world of social networking and Facebook."
She had read an article on unattended funerals and the questions played on her mind for months after. "These people - is it a choice that they make, to know no one and be cut off from the world? Or is it that once you start to slip between the cracks it's difficult to come back up again?"
The idea refused to go away. So, with four years' experience as a runner and assistant producer and a few credits under her belt, Lucy applied to First Cut, Channel 4's emerging talent strand - which commissions aspiring, talented directors with a budget of up to £50k to make a half-hour, primetime documentary.
The idea was accepted, she thinks, because it is "not your typical TV documentary". While Channel 4 provided production support, she had the freedom to do exactly what she wanted. "First Cut is brilliant because you can experiment without having to fit into any template," she says.
That turned out to be the easy part. "Finding someone that no-one knows is a flawed ambition from the outset," she says. Working with a coroner in Manchester, she came across three deaths that offered more questions than answers. "When there's a file of someone's life and death reduced to a handful of pieces of paper, that's the starting point."
Working with a cameraman and a sound engineer, Lucy began painstakingly piecing together the fragmented facts she could find: talking to neighbours, primary school classmates, siblings that had lost touch a decade before.
Lucy insists that the film is a break from her style, but the way she describes her background suggests a fascination with loneliness and piecing together the past. She initially studied history, before pursuing a career in journalism, with ideas of becoming a war correspondent. She says, "you have more gung ho ideas when you are eighteen..."
Then, finishing a postgraduate course in magazine journalism she did work experience at a documentary company and realised that she'd found her medium. "I'm not interested in issues based stuff, investigative documentaries. I like exploring the minutiae of things, things that aren't necessarily newsworthy," she says.
Death is a tricky subject to direct. Lucy says she experienced some hostility when making the documentary. "People said, 'What right do you have to make a film about these people's lives when they haven't given their consent?"
She acknowledges the view, but feels strongly that someone should recognise these 'invisible people.' "I don't claim to make a full portrait of all that they were. I hope to sketch out the edges of their character and imagine their place in the world."
The project posed technical challenges: how do you make a documentary without characters? She got around this by being creative with visuals and music. She raves about the talents of her photographer Johann Perry, who "totally understood" the project, exploiting images of solitude, "lots of shadows and clouds."
Of the two stories, the one that touched her the most was a young Nigerian man who came to London to study engineering, planning to return home to start a business. He received a brilliant mark for his thesis, but was hounded for unpaid fees and unable to claim his degree. He died aged 34. "In the three years since his funeral, no one knew he had died," she says softly.
As we go to leave I realise the song that's been playing in my head since the start of the interview. "Eleanor Rigby, died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came." With no one else to pay tribute, isn't it the place of art to ensure lives don't go unnoticed?
Lucy seems to think so. "Don't we all want to be remembered?" she says.
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