BAFTA-winning artist brings Mayan trickster god to East London

Daniel Kavanagh is a BAFTA-winning 3D artist and self-taught filmmaker, currently in the process of making his second short film, Maximón.

Having raised funding through Kickstarter, Kavanagh is taking on the roles of writer, director, editor, colourist and sound designer himself.

Set in a future East London, Maximón follows a Guatemalan immigrant and artist, Ixchel, who is visited by the Mayan god of mischief.

Kavanagh’s first short film, All is Calm, received awards including Best Short Film at the Santa Barbara Movie Awards and First Time Filmmaker at the Munich Short Film Awards.

“I genuinely thought no one was going to see it,” he tells me. “But then I applied to some film festivals, and it started being accepted and winning some awards, which was a nice surprise.”

From hunting for props and costumes in Brick Lane second-hand shops to carrying all the equipment through train stations, Daniel says: “I worked with my family and friends. It was just me and the cast, doing everything… So it really was kind of like pure guerrilla filmmaking.”

The debut short was shot over one long, gruelling weekend, something he admits he may have been naive about.

“It was super intense. It was from first thing in the morning to late at night. I mean, I was still shooting the last shot when the taxi was pulling up to pick us up.”

All is Calm was screened at Daniel’s local childhood cinema, The Genesis in Bethnal Green, which he describes as a “really nice full circle moment”.

Maximón is a more ambitious project, and one he has given more time to in both filming and preparation. Across five separate weekend shoots, the 15-minute drama has 13 scenes and five locations – including Blackwall Station and the Barbican – and a £4,000 budget. After funding his first film entirely himself, Daniel was encouraged by his friends to raise funding for his next project.

“I thought, well I’ll put together a deck and I’ll put it on [Kickstarter] and if it doesn’t do anything then fair enough, but at least I would have tried.”

When I spoke to Daniel, he had just succeeded in hitting his target.

Daniel is completely self-taught, and his interest in filmmaking grew from a passion for photography.

“I went into it definitely thinking more about the cinematography than anything else – but then having to, through necessity, learn about everything else. I wanted to understand how to shoot light, how to edit, how to colour grade. Lots of videos, lots of books. I’ve got every book I could find on the different disciplines.”

He saved for and collected his own equipment over four years, with each pay cheque buying a new piece of equipment – a tripod one month, a new lens the next. Coming from a fine art background, he admits writing is the part he is least comfortable with.

“When I’m writing, the images come first. So for me the writing process is trying to translate those images into words – and then when I go and shoot, it’s translating those words back into images.”

Trickster god

The idea for Maximón came from many conversations with Daniel’s Guatemalan sister-in-law, who told him about the mythologies of Mayan gods, including the titular character, a trickster folk god.

“So they have wooden shrines to Maximón [in Guatemala],” Daniel recounts about the Mayan/Catholic-inspired god. “And they put colourful ties on him and give him something to drink. He’d smoke cigars and he’s got a hat and a suit. As soon as I saw some of the imagery and I read about the kind of character that he was, I just thought, he needs to be in a film.”

Heritage is a key theme in the film, with the central character Ixchel painting to maintain a connection to her roots. Her visual identity on screen uses green and red, inspired by Guatemala’s national bird, the quetzal.

Daniel actually cast his sister-in-law, Lucia Reyes, to play the character, sharing, “the more we were talking about it and fleshing out the film, it became obvious that she should play the character as well, which she was really excited about.”

Keeping the filming unit small, Daniel has cast his brother Robert as Maximón, having seen him shine in the first short film. A friend, Calum Hill, is playing the short’s antagonist, Captain Cizin.

“In the future, especially if I’m doing a feature film, I’m going to have to open it out, get more funding and work with a bigger crew. But I thought it would be nice to keep this one quite small again and just have it being a close-knit group.”

The Mayan god of mischief isn’t presented as a conventional fantasy character. He’s described as quiet, poetic and tender without sentimentality, appearing as a weary, unkempt, moustached man in a dark fedora and long grey coat, with brightly coloured ties around his neck. He drinks whiskey from a silver hip flask and smokes cigars.

“It’s going to be a slightly bleaker version of London,” says Daniel. “So to have this very colourful character slice through it is going to be interesting visually.”

Daniel will also be drawing on his 3D artist background to create some VFX, overlaying them onto the bleak East London backdrops.

Festival circuit

Daniel is currently filming the short over the course of September and October, before he begins the edit. As with All is Calm, the film will then be submitted for the festival circuit.

“The first film I was really just making it for me. Whereas now I really want to make something to put out there to show people. There’s definitely more ambition. I’ll probably be looking at the bigger festivals for sure. We’ll see how that goes.”

Speaking about the future, he shares that his next project is a feature film, which he hopes to get off the ground next year.

“The main thing with these two short films was to be a sponge and to learn as much as I can about everything to do with filmmaking, from the beginning to the final edit. And then what I want to do next is take all of that experience into a full length feature.”

Maximón will be completed in 2027. Keep an eye on Daniel’s website for updates.

Watch Daniel’s first film All is Calm on Vimeo here.