DAU Wins Silver Lion at Venice as Khrzhanovsky's 20-Year Experiment Returns to Its Origins

Ilya Khrzhanovsky was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival for his film DAU, which runs for 195 minutes and is associated with the project's original film. This recognition came after a contentious jury discussion. The ambitious project commenced in the late 2000s in Kharkiv, where a complete Soviet research institute was built for a biopic about Nobel laureate Lev Landau. It transformed into an anthropological study involving 400 participants and 10,000 extras from 2008 to 2011, yielding nearly 700 hours of footage. Teodor Currentzis plays Landau in Venice, despite facing protests from the Ukrainian government. Khrzhanovsky, born in Moscow in 1975 and residing in Germany, renounced his Russian citizenship in 2024, dismissing allegations of mistreatment on set.