| Credits |
| 2005, 24 mins. (AFI)
Director: Jonathan Messer Writer: Chris Raymond Producer: Petra Erikssen Editor: Byron Smith Director of Photography: Kevin Krupitzer Production Designer: Kristy Thomley Composer: Sean Morris Cast: Taylor Dayne, Madison Eginton, Rebecca Klinger |
| About |
| Jonathan Messer's Joshua Tree packs a lot into its brief running time: a loving but frayed mother/daughter relationship; a burgeoning friendship between a lonely little girl and her new neighbor, a widowed environmental scientist; and a meditation on how the heavens have inspired both scientific inquiry and imaginative flight.
Messer, an Australian native currently living in Melbourne, has logged time as an assistant director on such BBC shows as Top of the Pops and Absolutely Fabulous, and has also explored his passion for storytelling and for working with actors while earning a master's degree at the American Film Institute. Although he also trained as a theater director at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, Messer says, "I love the way that there is a permanence of film, and the many different types of technical skills needed to make it work." Working with Sloan consultant Joan Horvath, Messer wanted not just to tell the story of "a female scientist living and working in an environment dominated by men," but also to include "a purely educational scientific element for the story; the history of the stars and how they got there." Messer envisioned the film as achieving "an emotional segue allowing us to explore what the female scientist and the young girl place emotionally on the stars. Lyrical, beautiful, and quite poetic, really." Messer's interest in the inner lives of women can also be seen in one of his current projects, a documentary about his experiences "working as a drug and alcohol outreach worker. It's called A Day in My Shoes. It explores the lives of women in law enforcement, health care, the judiciary, and prostitution, and how their lives intersect. It considers the similarities of shift work and the extremes of the work events." "I think," says Messer, "it is important to portray complicated human aspects of characters which give them breadth and depth and make them come to life." |
| Online Resources |
| Ecological Society of America Association for Women in Science and Engineering |
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