Venice gives Best Director to DAU — and hands its loudest controversy a second act

No prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival will be argued over longer than this one. The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ilya Khrzhanovsky for DAU, the title that arrived on the Lido under protest and left it with the competition’s craft honour — a sequence that guarantees the debate around the film a second life well past the ceremony.

DAU is the cinema arm of a project Khrzhanovsky has pursued for years: an immersive, total-environment reconstruction built around a Soviet research institute, staged at a scale that blurs the line between film set and lived experiment. That method is precisely what has always split viewers. Admirers call it a singular attempt to film a system from the inside; critics have long raised questions about how its participants were treated inside so encompassing a production. A Best Director prize rewards the control behind that scale — and cannot help but read as an endorsement of the method itself.

The premiere sharpened all of it. The screening drew a protest, with objections tied both to a Russian-led project screening prominently during the war in Ukraine and to the presence of conductor Teodor Currentzis, whose institutional ties in Russia have drawn scrutiny across European cultural venues. Festival director Alberto Barbera defended the selection from the podium, arguing the festival’s job is to show the work and let the argument happen in the open. The jury, days later, answered that argument by naming Khrzhanovsky the edition’s best director.

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That is what makes the choice legible as a statement rather than a routine craft nod. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s panel had been read all fortnight as attentive to the ethics of image-making — who is filmed, on what terms, by whom. Handing its directing prize to the edition’s most ethically contested film is either a contradiction of that reputation or its sharpest expression: a jury insisting that difficult, even troubling, cinema is exactly what a competition exists to weigh rather than avoid.

It also reframes the top of the palmarès. With the Golden Lion going to May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown and the Grand Jury Prize to Lee Chang-dong, the jury kept its two most celebratory awards clear of controversy and placed its most divisive statement in the directing category — a distribution that looks deliberate, awarding ambition and consensus separately.

What it unlocks is less a commercial runway than a conversation. DAU was never going to travel like a conventional release, and a Venice directing prize hands it the one thing the project has always converted into fuel: attention, and the argument that comes with it. Whether that argument reads as vindication or as a festival looking away from hard questions is the debate Venice has now sent into the season.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, recap, Best Director, DAU, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Teodor Currentzis

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