When Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s Dau project was publicly unveiled, first with a Paris exhibition in 2019, and then with two films (Dau. Natasha and Dau. Degeneration) in competition at the 2020 Berlinale, it struggled to convey the project’s initial immersive aims. The Russian director intended to create a functioning scientific research institute in Soviet Moscow, with intellectual progress fighting against state surveillance, and – with its cast of non-professionals living on the set in Kharkiv, Ukraine – sought to sow doubt about the boundary between fact and fiction. Accusations about Khrzhanovsky’s methods and the safety of the performers also plunged the project into disrepute.

So, it was a surprise to see a new feature film constructed from the reams of footage, merely entitled Dau, in competition at Venice this year, and also a more welcome one to see it deliver on the project’s initial promise, with the director winning the Silver Lion for Best Director at last weekend’s awards ceremony (see the news). We tried to get the scoop on the project’s development, and conclusion, from the director himself.

Cineuropa: How did you end up returning to the project and continuing to add footage? Was it always the intention to create a definitive feature film on the scientist Lev Landau himself?
Ilya Khrzhanovsky: It was inspired initially by the story of Landau. But quite quickly, I moved to a different story. It was important to have a character who represented a kind of pre-Christian, pre-Abrahamic religion and culture. For example, an ancient Greek one, entailing another type of ethics and understanding of the world.

So, I started to make a very complex, but still “normal”, movie, but with different teams involved, and with a unique shooting block, camera team and production designer. I wanted to build the world. If you look at your own life, the colours and situations change in different periods. And then, at some point, I focused more on other stories, to establish the whole project. Time is also one of the characters – time, with all of its possible dimensions. In light of the additional cinematography taking place between 2022 and 2024, I’ve decided not to say which episodes were filmed where. But it was important to have a strong connection with the present time.

What made you want to cast Teodor Currentzis and Radmila Shchogolieva in the two lead roles?
When Teodor started to work, he was not as famous as he is now [he is a noted classical conductor], but it was clear to me he was a very unusual person – a genius and a visionary, with a very personal and unusual point of view regarding the project’s “reality”, coupled with more logical and traditional choices. Radmila was the only professional actress in the film from the beginning. I'm thankful for her work because she initially lost 20 kilos for it. You need to be really dedicated, emotionally and professionally, and also to examine the nature of family life as we do.

There’s a precise balance in this film and the previous ones between three types of sequences: scientific lectures and debates; scenes of characters’ recreational lives and their parties, especially their pursuit of sex; and passages that show the surveillance that the institute is under by the secret police, and their interrogation methods.
The first part of this movie is more action-packed; it’s quite quick, with a traditional story. Then, at some point, it becomes very surrealistic – you don’t know if it’s a dream or reality. In the second part, we’re landing in a kind of claustrophobic reality, and everything is slowed down. It doesn’t matter what’s occurred in our life, but there are some forces, some elements, which have a different speed. I’m trying to build these other kinds of dimensions that sometimes appear in our life.

I don’t have a physics or science background, but I enjoyed following the scientific discourse.
I was actually the worst in my secondary-school class! And then, at some point, you just understand the beauty. It's natural philosophy. The story is inspired by Landau, but it’s really very far from the truth: he never collaborated with the KGB and so on. But what Landau, Teodor, Peter Sellars, Carlo Rovelli and the other artists who participated in the project have in common is that they can see invisible things and can make them, in a way, visible. It was really important to find people with a body language that belongs to the time. Everything is about energy.

Could you share more about the background of Vladimir Azhippo, who plays the terrifying KGB investigator?
He was retired, but before, he was a real investigator in a prison, a colonel. But he was also ready to talk about himself, to show himself. It’s a big question: are you ready for this kind of adventure? Do you need this adventure? If you need it, you’re ready, and then you go for it.

The project, from its inception, and what it eventually grew into, was always a statement on the workings of totalitarianism. Yet I’m sure that Russia’s war on Ukraine, in the subsequent years, has sharpened your sense of what you wanted to convey about Russian culture and politics.
I would say it a bit differently: it's about Soviet culture. But of course, you can find its roots somewhere earlier than the USSR. It’s about the level of trauma and how many people were killed. When you talk about fascism in Italy, there was a smaller number of people killed in Mussolini’s time. In Russia, it was tens of millions, and it was mostly the “best” people, the most interesting and creative intellectuals. It was a kind of genocide within our own country. And you can see its connection to the current war – it’s a manifestation of Soviet imperialism. Of course, from the beginning of the war, even before the full-scale invasion, I was on the Ukrainian side. For me, there is no doubt. Until 2023, I was the artistic director of the Babyn Yar Memorial Holocaust Centre, where I actually financed and produced two films by Sergei Loznitsa [Babi Yar. Context and an unmade dramatic feature on the massacre]. We built a few monuments there, also. But then the war started.