Shielding Sheila is a short narrative film written and directed by Joyce Grey-Carter who portrays the lead role of Sheila in the film. The film began shooting near the end of July 2020 and its filming location took place at her home because of the Covid-19 restrictions. Filming took place on a weekly basis, on Saturday’s, over a period of 6/7 weeks and was completed at the end of September / beginning of October 2020.
Sheila is a married woman who is shielding due to having an underlying health condition that gradually begins to impact on her mental health as well as her relationship with her husband Michael, causing great disharmony on an emotional and physical level. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, she finds herself struggling to maintain a normal existence as a result of being forced to shield. Engulfed in personal tragedy, she becomes overwhelmingly possessed by her raging, internal, demonic sickness, coupled with the uncontrollable, external forces triggered by the Covid-19 Pandemic restrictions. In order to not risk losing her husband, and her own ‘affected’ sanity and wellness, she resorts to taking matters into her own hands irrespective of the Covid restrictions that attempts to ‘steal her life from her’. She holds onto the hope of ‘faith’ as a cure for all her ills.
Joyce Grey-Carter is a British, Black Actress, Voiceover Artist and an emerging Screenwriter and Director, born and living in London UK, of Jamaican parentage. She is married to Clive Grey-Carter and they have a young adult daughter and two cats.
Joyce trained as an Actress in the early 1980s at Mountview Theatre School in North London, UK now known as the Judi Dench Theatre School and then went on to complete a BA Honours degree in Performance Arts at London’s Middlesex Polytechnic, (now Middlesex University) in the mid-1980s.
Joyce trained as a Drama Teacher at Goldsmith College University in 1990, and graduated as a Drama and English Teacher. Joyce then went on to teach Drama, literacy and numeracy in Secondary Mainstream and Special Education Schools in London, working as a behaviour specialist as well, for a period of 28 years.
After leaving the Teaching profession at the end of 2017, Joyce returned to working as a professional Actor and alongside that, embarked upon a new professional career as a Voiceover Artist in 2018 to date, working from her professional, home recording studio.
She has featured in a number Staged Productions, Music Videos, Films/Short Films, TV Commercials and an Infomercial as well as an Apple TV Sci-Fi series called Foundation.
Joyce has always been an avid writer since her childhood school days and has also turned her hand to writing Screenplays as well as Directing.
She also likes to sing Jazz and Blues and she has been teaching herself to play the double bass since 2016. She also plays some guitar and piano as well.
Joyce has also coached others in Voiceover techniques and produced free demo reels for them.
Joyce’s moto is ‘do unto others as you so wish them to do unto you’.
Joyce’s main ambition is to continue being artistic in every way possible, through acting, voiceover and the writing of screenplays as well as directing; in order to give herself and others who are normally underrepresented within the Performing Arts industry, opportunities to regularly work as Creatives.