Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU has finally reached the Venice International Film Festival, premiering in competition after more than two decades of development. Starring Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis as Soviet physicist Dau, the 195-minute film is the culmination of an extraordinary production that grew far beyond its original idea. What began as a film inspired by physicist Lev Landau became an enormous experiment involving thousands of participants, an elaborate Soviet-era world and hundreds of hours of footage.
Khrzhanovsky began DAU as a project about Lev Landau, a brilliant Soviet physicist whose life provided the starting point for the story. Over time, the production expanded into an immersive recreation of a Soviet research institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The filmmakers constructed a 12,000-square-metre environment and filled it with people, objects and details designed to make the period feel real rather than simply look convincing on screen.
The scale is difficult to compare with a conventional film. According to the production’s own audit, DAU involved 392,000 auditions, 40,000 costumes, around 10,000 extras and 400 principal roles. The project eventually produced 700 hours of 35mm footage and 8,000 hours of recorded dialogue. More than 37 million words were transcribed, while around 500,000 photographs were taken on the set.
The Institute was central to that unusual process. Participants entered a world built around Soviet rules, clothing, food and everyday objects, allowing the production to blur the line between acting and lived experience. Rather than creating only the appearance of the past, Khrzhanovsky attempted to build an environment in which people could behave within it for extended periods. That approach generated an enormous amount of material that later had to be shaped into films.
The project also challenged conventional ideas about casting. Currentzis, better known as a conductor, plays Dau, while real scientists and major cultural figures became part of the wider experiment. Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Gross and mathematician Shing-Tung Yau were among those associated with the Institute, while performance artist Marina Abramović and director Peter Sellars also participated. Their presence added another unusual layer to a production operating somewhere between cinema, performance and social experiment.
The Institute itself eventually disappeared. After the main period of shooting, the enormous Kharkiv set was deliberately destroyed in November 2011, with the destruction filmed as part of the project. Accounts of the event describe a staged assault involving extremist figures, turning the burning of the set into a dramatic end for the world that had been created there.
Yet DAU did not end with the destruction of the Institute. Much of the material remained unseen for years, and the project continued to evolve through editing and later work. The Venice film brings together material shot around 15 years ago with recent scenes, according to Khrzhanovsky’s statement for the festival. The long gap therefore became part of the film’s history rather than simply a delay between production and release.
Its arrival in Venice also carries a political dimension. Ukraine has protested the screening because of DAU’s Russian connections and Currentzis’s position, while Khrzhanovsky has renounced his Russian citizenship and opposed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The controversy now accompanies a film already defined by an unusually long and complicated journey.
For Venice, DAU is therefore more than another competition title. Its premiere places the final result of a project that consumed years, enormous resources and vast amounts of creative material before an international audience. After two decades of transformation, DAU has finally arrived at the festival where its extraordinary history can be considered alongside the film itself. Its production history gives the Venice premiere a significance beyond its running time, making the event as much about the journey as the finished work.
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