Watch Me Disappear

Each year in Britain around 2,500 people are buried alone. No one claims them, and no one attends their funerals. Others have lain dead and undiscovered for weeks, or even years, before they are found, and relatives traced.

Driven by a desire to find out more about these lonely individuals from the people who knew and loved them, Lucy Cohen's bitter-sweet first film pieces together two peoples' lives, and asks how it is possible for anyone to simply slip through the cracks and disappear.

Using coroner's reports, reconstruction and good old-fashioned detective work, Cohen painstakingly puts together the stories of two people who died on the same case files of the same coroner in Manchester and who are buried in the same graveyard.

As she tracks down relatives and friends, touching stories emerge: the hard-working student dreaming of setting up his own business, and the fashion-conscious girl who stood up to school bullies and played on the street.

Celebrating these lost lives, Cohen finds warmth and humour far removed from the bleakness of a lonely death, and pays her respects to those who died unnoticed, but who lived like the rest of us.