Twenty Years and Fourteen Films On, Khrzhanovsky’s ‘DAU’ Reaches Venice Competition Trailed by a Diplomatic Row

No film in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival arrived with a longer shadow behind it than DAU. Ilya Khrzhanovsky began the project the better part of two decades ago, and it has since become less a film than a country of its own: some fourteen films and series carved out of a single monstrous shoot, and now, at last, a work bearing the bare project name presented in competition for the Golden Lion. What reaches the Sala Grande is a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute feature built around the Greek-born conductor Teodor Currentzis, who plays a physicist living in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1968, drawn step by step into placing his genius at the service of the state that is building the deadliest weapon in history.

To understand what is on screen you have to understand what was built to make it. The DAU project took its name from the Soviet physicist Lev Landau — «Dau» to those around him — and between 2009 and 2011 Khrzhanovsky reconstructed a Soviet research institute at full scale in Kharkiv, then had hundreds of participants live inside it, in period dress and period rules, for months at a time. The camera did not so much record scenes as harvest them from a functioning world. That method has drawn as much argument as admiration ever since, and one branch of it — DAU. Natasha — already carried a Silver Bear out of the 2020 Berlinale. Venice is where the project finally presents itself as a single film competing on equal terms with the rest.

It does so inside a controversy that has nothing to do with mise-en-scène. Ukraine’s foreign and culture ministries, together with the country’s embassy in Italy, publicly questioned the selection, calling DAU «a project linked to the Russian state and its networks of influence» and warning that handing it one of the world’s most prestigious cultural platforms «sends a deeply worrying signal.» Currentzis, whose ensembles have long been financed through Russian institutions, sits at the centre of that objection. The festival did not blink. Artistic director Alberto Barbera answered that DAU «is not a Russian film» but «a film that denounces totalitarian regimes and their intrusion into citizens’ lives to restrict their freedom,» and called the campaign against its inclusion «a petty and unacceptable act» built on «false premises and the manipulation of reality.»

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Khrzhanovsky, for his part, declined to trade in denials. Asked about the backlash, he said the only thing he could wish for was «peace and success for the Ukrainian government… to save the country and to win this war» — a sentence that refuses the frame his critics had drawn around him without pretending the war is not happening. Whether that answer settles anything is another matter; the Lido has spent this edition testing how far a festival can separate a work from the apparatus that produced it, and DAU is the sharpest version of the question.

What is not in doubt is the ambition. Khrzhanovsky belongs to the small line of filmmakers who treat cinema as something to be lived rather than staged, and DAU pushes that instinct past the point most directors would consider sane: the totalitarian century is not described but rebuilt, so that surveillance, fear and complicity are conditions the actors inhabit rather than emotions they perform. The risk is obvious — a method this total can collapse into its own myth, the making-of swallowing the film. A first screening cannot say whether the finished work justifies the apparatus or is finally crushed by it.

DAU competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. It is the kind of title that will divide the room whatever the verdict — and, given the week it has had, the argument outside the cinema may prove louder than the one inside it.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, Alberto Barbera, DAU, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Teodor Currentzis

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