Taniel

Taniel
Directed by	Garo Berberian
Screenplay by	Garo Berberian, Ben Hodgson
Produced by	Nare Ter-Gabrielyan, Tatevik Ayvazyan
Starring	Tigran Gaboyan, Yegya Akgun, Shoghakat MLKE-Galstyan
Narrated by	Sean Bean
Cinematography	Guri Goliadze, Ben Hodgson
Music by	Tigran Hamasyan, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman
Production company	Rebel Republic Films
Release date	March 23, 2018 (2018-03-23) (Bermuda)
Running time	20 minutes
Countries	UK, Armenia
Language	English / Western Armenian

Taniel (Armenian: "Դանիէլ") is a multi award winning arthouse short film by British writer and director Garo Berberian, 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 (according to Unesco classification^[1]) 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.