Farewell Waltz: Looking Back on a Short Film I Made in 2020
There is something both reminiscent and uncomfortable about watching your own work years after making it. You see every instinct you got right despite not fully knowing what you were doing, and every place you played it safe when you should have pushed harder. Farewell Waltz was my final short film as a writer-director. It came out in the summer of 2020, ran ten minutes, cost £10,000, and told a story I genuinely cared about at the time. I don't make films anymore, but this one still holds a place in my heart.
Key Takeaways
- Farewell Waltz is a 2020 ten-minute silent period romance, written and directed by Kaine Levy.
- The film is a tribute to Walter Tull, the first Black British officer in the British Army, whose story is largely absent from mainstream British history.
- It stars Daniel Davids and Isobel Wood, and features no spoken dialogue, relying entirely on physical performance and score.
- The original score was composed by Colombian composer Felipe Téllez and performed by the Budapest Art Orchestra.
- The Farewell Waltz short film received positive reviews from The Independent Critic, Indie Shorts Mag, and UK Film Review on release.
- The film reflects a commitment to classical cinematic language, historical storytelling, and emotional restraint.
Table of Contents
What the Film Is About
Farewell Waltz follows Charles, an impoverished Jamaican man, and Rose, a wealthy English woman, on the eve of the Second World War. Their story is told entirely without words. No dialogue, just performance, world-building, and music.
On the surface, it's a forbidden love story. Underneath, it's about Walter Tull.
Walter Tull was the first Black British officer in the British Army, a man who served with distinction in the First World War at a time when it was technically illegal for a Black man to hold command over white soldiers. He was decorated, respected by the men he led, and killed in action in 1918. He was never awarded the Military Cross he was twice recommended for. His story is almost entirely absent from the popular telling of British history, and that absence is its own statement.
I adapted the setting to World War II to give the film its own narrative space, but the connection to Tull is embedded throughout. The 'W' on Charles's dog tag is for Walter. His regimental number is Tull's date of death. These details were never meant to be announced. They are there for anyone who looks, and irrelevant to anyone who doesn't. That felt like the right way to honour him.
The Making of It
I was a young filmmaker. I had things to learn, and I learned most of them by making this film.
Looking back, there are choices I would revisit. More tension. Higher stakes. A sharper sense of danger in the romance, not just its tragedy. When I watch it now, I can see exactly where I played it safe, where I stayed within what I knew was achievable rather than reaching for what would have made the scene truly uncomfortable. That instinct to protect the film from failing in interesting ways is something you only lose with experience.
But I'm also genuinely proud of what we made.
The colour grading, the locations, the classical framing: these things I think we got right. There was a specific reference point in my head, the kind of traditional Hollywood romance I grew up watching, the ones that let silence carry weight and trusted the audience to feel what wasn't said. Getting that feeling into a ten-minute short made on a limited budget required every decision to earn its place. I think a lot of them did.
Worth Noting: Farewell Waltz is a silent film in the most practical sense: there is no dialogue, and the actors had to carry the full emotional weight of every scene through physical performance alone. Daniel Davids and Isobel Wood were exceptional in this regard. That is a specific and demanding skill, and they delivered.
The Score
This is the part I'm proudest of, and also the most personally meaningful.
The original score was composed by Colombian composer Felipe Téllez and recorded with the Budapest Art Orchestra in eastern Europe. A live orchestral recording, for a ten-minute short film, on a £10,000 budget.
Before I was a filmmaker, I was a professional musician. I played drums in a band, toured the UK, signed to a label. Music was the thing I built my identity around for years. So to watch a full orchestra perform a score written for something I had directed, that landed somewhere I hadn't anticipated. It was one of the best moments of that chapter of my life.
The score carries a significant portion of the film's emotional register. In the absence of words, it does the heavy lifting, and I think it does so beautifully. The Budapest Art Orchestra brought a weight and warmth to Téllez's composition that no digital production could have replicated. I'm glad we insisted on doing it properly.
Critical Reception
The critical response was fair. The Independent Critic called it "a stylish, beautiful short film." Indie Shorts Mag described it as "a brilliantly crafted film with a lot of heart, passion, and very important things to say." UK Film Review published a positive notice. IndyRed covered it too.
The reviewers understood what the film was trying to do, and said so. That matters more than I expected it to at the time.
The one honest frustration: I would have liked more festival screenings than we got. The film came out in the summer of 2020, which created its own particular set of obstacles for distribution and festival attendance. In a different year, I think it would have travelled further. That's not a complaint, just a fact. The landscape was what it was.
Looking Back
I don't make films anymore. That chapter of my life closed, and what came after it has been a better fit for who I actually am: building Ventur Agency, working as a fractional CMO and marketing consultant with founders and business owners who need genuine strategic leadership.
