DAU

There are ambitious film projects. There are insane film projects. And then there is DAU.

An unprecedented social experiment co-written, co-produced and directed by Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, DAU may be the craziest, gargantuan and most daring cinematic undertaking of the past few decades. Loosely inspired by the life of Soviet physicist Lev Landau, nicknamed Dau, the film follows a genius living through some of the darkest chapters of history. Dau would like to decypher the laws of the universe, and refuses to surrender his intellect to the Soviet Party, resisting its attempts to turn his scientific brilliance towards the creation of the atomic bomb.

But the real story of DAU begins behind the camera, as Khrzhanovskiy didn't simply make a film about totalitarianism: he created one. Beginning in 2008, the director constructed what became the largest film set ever built in Europe: an entire Soviet world in which around 400 people lived for years. Actors were joined by chefs, scientists, religious figures, philosophers, secret agents and other non-professionals, all immersed in an environment designed to recreate Soviet life down to its smallest detail. The production ran intermittently from 2009 to 2011, the participants lived in period costumes and makeup, and no contemporary objects were permitted on set, including money, as only a local currency was allowed. Even when the cameras weren't rolling, since Dau had no screenplay. Instead, people were placed inside this meticulously constructed world, with realistic identities and jobs, and simply allowed to live and react. It is method acting taken to its logical, borderline deranged extreme, a real life Synecdoche, New York.

The result is roughly 700 hours of footage, shot on film, eventually transformed into fourteen feature films, with more still to come, alongside television series, books, conferences and art installations. The film presented in Competition in Venice is the principal work, a three-hour mother narrative from which the rest of the sprawling DAU universe emerges.

There is something almost obscene about the scale of the undertaking. DAU doesn't merely indulge in its grandiosity; it revels in it. Every frame seems to announce the extraordinary circumstances under which it was created. Yet, att its most intimate, DAU feels an anthropological document. At its most expansive, it becomes a historical nightmare. Soviet society is reconstructed as a surreal dystopia of misery, paranoia and ritualised obedience, where people perform futile tasks and survive on cabbage and, when fortune smiles upon them, animal heads.

And yet this is where the film's greatest question emerges.

Was it worth it?

The production methods are so extraordinary that they overshadow the film itself. We know how the world was built, and that these people lived inside it, that the boundaries between performance and reality were deliberately blurred, that the project became its own ecosystem. But does knowing all of this make the actual film any better? Or is DAU ultimately most interesting as the record of an extraordinary experiment rather than the extraordinary film that experiment was supposed to produce?

Khrzhanovskiy is clearly interested in time itself as a cinematic material, time not simply as something a film depicts, but something it captures. People age, relationships change, collapse, and rebuild, and power shifts. The visual language is audacious, oppressive and often breathtaking, occasionally producing images so strange and hypnotic that they feel destined for cinephile folklore. There is a strong Dogma sensibility running through it, with Lars von Trier seemingly hovering over the project like a mischievous ghost.

Unsettling, surreal, controversial, and unique, DAU is a film about power that was itself created through an extraordinary concentration of power. Whether that contradiction makes DAU brilliant or excessive is another question entirely.

Perhaps it is both.