Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the director Venice rewarded for DAU without settling how he made it

Ilya Khrzhanovsky

Photo: CaseyJNewell / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 11, 1975 Moscow, Soviet Union
Occupation	Film director and producer
Known for	4
Awards	Silver Lion · Tiger Award, International Film Festival Rotterdam · Master Award, Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival

For most of his career, Ilya Khrzhanovsky has been argued about more than he has been watched. People who never sat through an hour of DAU hold firm opinions about the institute he built in Kharkiv, about the hundreds of non-actors who lived inside it under the eye of a camera, and about what the women on that set went through. Venice has now handed him the Silver Lion for Best Director for the film that was meant to explain all of it, and the prize settles only half the dispute. It says the film works. It says nothing about the method, and Khrzhanovsky has never accepted that the two can be pulled apart.

He treats cinema less as a set of scenes than as a place where people are made to live, and he has spent two decades defending the right to build such places.

The inheritance is easy to read. His father is Andrei Khrzhanovsky, one of the most admired animation directors of the Soviet and Russian school; his mother, Mariya Neyman, is a philologist and script editor; his grandfather Yury Khrzhanovsky was a painter and actor. He grew up in Moscow, where he arrived on 11 August 1975, spent a year at the Bonn Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1990s and graduated from VGIK, the state film school, in 1998. That year he co-directed a short, Stop, with Artyom Mikhalkov, then spent several years in advertising and television.

His first feature announced the temperament. 4, written by Vladimir Sorokin, was planned as a short and took four years to become a full film. Three strangers in a Moscow bar, among them a piano tuner played by the rock singer Sergei Shnurov, trade invented biographies, one a tale of human cloning dating back to Stalin; the film then follows the woman of the trio to a dying village where old women chew bread into the faces of dolls. It won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam in 2005, and Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times that its images came “as close to the experience of an actual nightmare as anything I’ve seen on the screen.”

In 2005 he co-founded Phenomen Films, which developed Aleksei German Jr.’s Paper Soldier. That film won German the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice in 2008, the same prize its producer would collect eighteen years later.

By then DAU had swallowed him. It began as a biopic of Lev Landau, the Nobel-winning Soviet physicist known as Dau, and turned into something with no clear name. In Kharkiv the production built a 12,000-square-metre research institute and filled it with people chosen from 392,000 auditions: physicists, artists, cooks, waitresses, former secret police officers. From October 2009 to November 2011 they lived there in period clothes, without modern objects or modern slang, filmed intermittently on 35mm with no script and no takes. The conductor Teodor Currentzis played Dau; the physicist Carlo Rovelli passed through, as did Marina Abramović and Romeo Castellucci. The shoot left 700 hours of film.

The material reached the public in 2019 as an installation across the Théâtre du Châtelet, the Théâtre de la Ville and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, after Berlin cancelled a version that involved rebuilding a stretch of the Wall. A year later the Berlinale selected DAU. Natasha, co-directed with Jekaterina Oertel, for its competition, where cinematographer Jürgen Jürges took the Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution, and showed the six-hour DAU. Degeneration alongside it.

The argument has never gone away, and it is the right argument to have. Reports in GQ in 2011 and in Le Monde in 2019 described a closed world that was hostile and at times abusive, particularly toward women, and a director who spoke to and about his cast in degrading terms. A group of Russian journalists wrote an open letter against the Berlinale selection; Russia’s culture ministry refused DAU. Natasha a distribution licence on the grounds of its unsimulated sex. Khrzhanovsky denied the accusations in Berlin, and several participants, among them lead actress Natalia Berezhnaya, defended him. At Sarajevo in 2025 he went further: “Methodologically, I think I did everything right,” he told Variety, adding that “emotion is always brutal” and that art is the one protected place where you can go that far and then step out. The weak point is that last clause. The people of the Institute did not step off a stage at the end of the day. They lived on it for months, and the director held the keys.

His other long project was also about memory and also ended in dispute. From 2019 he served as artistic director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv. A leaked draft of his concept in 2020 prompted the historian Karel Berkhoff to resign; Khrzhanovsky answered in The Jerusalem Post that the draft did not reflect what he intended. The centre went on to unveil Abramović’s Crystal Wall of Crying, and he produced Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Babi Yar. Context, which won the Golden Eye at Cannes in 2021. He stepped down in September 2023, saying it was not right to work in Ukraine without living there and sharing its dangers.

He has lived outside Russia since 2007 and is based in Berlin. He opposed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine from the start; in March 2024 Moscow’s Ministry of Justice listed him as a foreign agent, and in September 2024 he renounced his Russian citizenship.

None of that spared DAU in Venice. The film, which covers Dau’s life from 1928 to 1968 and joins the Kharkiv footage to scenes shot in 2024, premiered in competition on 9 September 2026 after Ukraine’s foreign and culture ministries publicly questioned its selection as a project linked to the Russian state. Festival director Alberto Barbera replied that “DAU is not a Russian film; it is not pro-Putin propaganda.” The reviews split along a familiar line. Screen called it “wildly ambitious, exuding the kind of lawless auteur craziness rarely seen in today’s narrative cinema”; Variety found it more impressive from a distance. The jury chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal gave him Best Director.

What comes next is the part of the project he has always called the real work. In 2025 he said two television series were being cut from the footage, and Dau.Digital, an online archive meant to open all 700 hours to viewers who build their own story through them, remains his stated goal. He also has a new company, IP Filmworks, founded in 2025 with his longtime producer Philippe Bober. The Silver Lion gives him the one thing he has lacked since Paris: a version of DAU that audiences can judge without taking anyone’s word for it.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, DAU, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Teodor Currentzis, DAU. Degeneration, DAU. Natasha