Joshua’s Dream

Nominated for a MullenLowe Nova Award, Joshua’s Dream is an autobiographical retelling of the experience of a young boy at a top British international ballet school, navigating a world that was not built with him in mind. The work explores the nuances and subtleties of inequality and otherness imposed upon him during his training, tracing a journey that ultimately leads to choosing sanity and peace over conformity. This decision opens a pathway into a world that embraces freedom of expression and authenticity, granting access to a space where selfhood can be lived fully.

The narrative is at once poignant and hopeful. It tells the story of a boy who entered an institution believing it would help him achieve his dreams. In many ways it did, though the outcome was not what he first imagined. Instead, his dream took shape through a transformation that foregrounded inner freedom and resilience. At its core, Joshua’s Dream communicates that no one is bound to remain in places where fulfilment is absent. To persist there is to risk the soul. Beyond such confinement, life abounds, and the act of stepping into one’s own dreamscape becomes a radical form of self-preservation.

The leading intention of the project is to evoke feelings of isolation and internal torment, mirroring the emotional reality of vocational ballet school. It acts as an autobiographical expression of a lived moment in time, one that could only be fully conveyed by constructing a world outside this one. Movement was developed directly from the body, translating inner confusion into physical motifs that aligned with the narrative.

From its conception, the film was envisioned as existing within an alternate space, a metaphor for the compartmentalisation of memory. Through inventive use of lighting and abstracted environments, the work evokes the sensibility of a virtual reality, an imagined realm that holds and transforms lived experience. Visually, the narrative resists a classical structure, instead unfolding through an impressionistic rhythm of images, gestures, and atmospheres.