DAU

Ilya Khrzhanovsky's DAU project has been the most notorious undertaking in European cinema for close to two decades. Between 2009 and 2011 he built a twelve-thousand-square-metre replica of a Soviet research institute in Kharkiv, populated it with thousands of participants and filmed them continuously, accumulating some seven hundred hours of material. The project surfaced publicly as a Paris installation in 2019 and as two features at the Berlinale in 2020, DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration. This is the film all of that grew out of, edited from 2022 onwards with additional photography completed in 2024.

Dau is loosely modelled on the Nobel laureate Lev Landau, though the film fictionalises him freely. The conductor Teodor Currentzis plays him, opposite Radmila Shegoleva and the theatre director Anatoly Vasiliev as the head of the institute. Three cinematographers shot it: Jürgen Jürges, Manuel Alberto Claro and Lol Crawley. At a hundred and ninety-five minutes it screened in Venice with an intermission, and it is credited to German, French and Swedish producers including Phenomen Berlin, Essential Filmproduktion and Arte France Cinéma.

It won the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice 2026. Its selection drew a formal objection from Ukraine's culture and foreign ministries; the Biennale replied that the film is a German production and that Khrzhanovsky, who renounced his Russian citizenship and lives in Paris, is designated a foreign agent by Russia. Critics who saw it described a study of how a closed system reshapes the people inside it.