Dau film concludes decades-long Soviet reconstruction project

The film ‘Dau’, directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, has emerged as one of the most ambitious and controversial entries at the Venice Film Festival. The project centers on the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau, tracing his experiences between 1938 and 1968 as he became involved in the Soviet atomic bomb program under state pressure.

The production is the culmination of a massive, two-decade-long experimental performance. Starting in 2008, a full-scale replica of a Moscow physics institute was constructed in Kharkiv, Ukraine. For three years, hundreds of participants lived within the set under strict conditions designed to replicate Soviet life, where modern items and contemporary speech were prohibited.

Khrzhanovsky, who recently renounced his Russian citizenship, utilized 700 hours of footage to create the film. The project aims to portray the climate of surveillance, violence, and state control characteristic of that era, including historical episodes such as Stalinist trials and the famine of the 1930s. The production has previously faced controversy regarding its immersive methods and explicit content.