Taniel is a multi award winning arthouse short film by British writer and director, telling the story of the last months of poet Taniel Varoujan until his murder during the Armenian Genocide at the age of 31, the day of his son’s birth. The film is the first to deal with the story of a man considered to be one of Armenia’s greatest poets with international fame. The film is loosely based on the memoirs of Aram Andonian, a journalist arrested on the same day as Varoujan, on 24 April 1915, when some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up and deported in the first major event of the Armenian Genocide. The film takes an arthouse approach to the subject seen in film-noir with a narrative in poetry both with Varoujan’s now endangered Western Armenian language read by Yegya Akgun and Ben Hodgson’s English poem "Indelible", narrated by Sean Bean to critical acclaim. Philip Glass’s Glassworks played by Valentina Lisitsa, Michael Nyman’s Out of the Ruins, Jordi Savall’s Armenian Spirit and Tigran Hamasyan’s Luis I Luso form the soundtrack.
Style
“Taniel” is filmed in Neo-noir style, influenced by the Film noir movement and the works of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane and Rouben Mamoulian in The Mark of Zorro. The narrative of the film is heard through poetry in two languages - with Varoujan's original poems in the now endangered Western Armenian dialect expressing and explaining the scenes delivered by Yegya Akgun; and writer Ben Hodgson's narrative poetry in English delivered by multi award winning actor Sean Bean. Film's emotive music by Philip Glass, Tigran Hamasyan, Michael Nyman and the others is an integral part of the story, complementing the visuals and poetry.
The film uses two strands of poetry, in Western Armenian and English. Varoujan's original poetry is recited by Yeğya Akgün in Western Armenian, accompanied by English subtitles, translated by Alice Stone Blackwell, Tatul Sonentz-Papazian, etc. Young Taniel Varoujan had witnessed Hamidian massacres as a child, which profoundly affected his poetry, and the film uses some of his works which were prophetic about the 1915 events. "Taniel"'s scenes are explained in the poet's rich, innovative Western Armenian, using poems from his various books about loss, love, exile and his yearning for peace for the mankind. The film concludes with an epilogue from "Nemesis", an epic poem from "The Heart of the Race" The English poem, narrating the film, was written by Ben Hodgson and is called "Indelible". The poem is read by Sean Bean, and is "Ben’s reading of contemporary accounts of the actual events later to be depicted in the film". The dual language version of the film has Western Armenian subtitles for "Indelible". The film and the Varoujan poems used in Taniel came to the National Poetry Library's librarian, poet 's attention during the library's in August 2018. Subsequently, when Chris McCabe was working on the anthology based on poems in endangered languages, he considered Varoujan's works and picked 'Alms' to include among 50 other works. '' anthology was announced in , and published in September 2019. Varoujan's poem is presented in both in Western Armenian and in English, with an introduction and background about the poet, his life, the language and style. The book was very well received, and was officially launched at at Southbank Centre.
2019 — Cyprus International Film Festival: Best Short Direction
2019 — Art Visuals and Poetry Film Festival: International Audience Award
"Taniel" has been selected to screen and nominated at a number of international festivals in 2018, such as in Sydney, Toronto, Bucharest, Washington DC, etc. Among them were the biggest Armenian film festival, Golden Apricot; ScreenPlay Film Festival run by Shetland Arts, curated by Mark Kermode and Linda Ruth Williams and one of the oldest European Film Festivals at Montecatini. First festival of 2019 was SR Film Festival New York in March, followed by Buenos Aires, Avanca and Yerevan.
