DAU

The film DAU is the culmination of more than twenty years of work. It brings together material shot more than fifteen years ago with scenes created in recent years, transforming them into a single, unified work. Shaped by time itself, the film could only have been made today.

The starting point was my interest in the human being — in our ability to love, to create and to be free, to make moral choices and to experience happiness in a world where a totalitarian system gradually changes human nature itself.

I chose a Greek as the protagonist. As representatives of a pre-Christian civilization, the Greeks had concepts of morality and ethics founded on principles entirely different from our own. Greek tragedy unites fate and freedom: destiny exists as a higher order, yet it is fulfilled through countless, almost imperceptible human actions.

Contemporary physics was the project’s core conceptual reference, from which the language of the film emerged. Across the film’s several parts, different cinematographers, production designers and costume designers created three independent visual worlds. Along with them, the composition, light, colour, sound, rhythm, camera movement and the very nature of the actors’ presence change as well. Documentary reality, dream, vision and historical memory became equal states of a single reality, in analogy with quantum physics — a reality in which time and space are no longer linear or fixed.

The same principle drove the casting process. The film was shot over four years with thousands of extras who embodied their time. Their physicality, speech, gaze, movement and silence shaped the dramaturgy of the frame no less than the script.

In DAU, the world is constructed with almost archaeological precision while simultaneously existing according to the free laws of art. I sought to create a cinematic experience that continues after the film ends, with light, sound, space, rhythm, the body and time acting upon both the conscious and unconscious mind of the viewer and continuing to live within them.

Born in 1975, Ilya Khrzhanovsky is a film director and producer. He graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1998.

His debut feature, 4, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and went on to receive the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, followed by numerous international awards.

In 2006, he began work on the film DAU, which evolved into a multidisciplinary project at the intersection of cinema, visual art and anthropology, developed over more than two decades. Two films from the project, DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration, were included in the Official Selection of the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. DAU. Natasha received the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, recognising Jürgen Jürges’ cinematography.

Khrzhanovsky renounced his Russian citizenship in 2024 and holds German, British and Israeli citizenship. For his public criticism of Putin’s regime and his consistent anti-war stance, he was designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice.