On a cold night in November 2011, in a field outside Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, a gang of thugs stormed a Soviet scientific research institute, beat and humiliated the staff and burned the place to the ground.

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None of it was real. Well, some of it was. The institute was a film set — a working re-creation inspired by the Moscow institute run by the pioneering quantum physicist Lev Landau. It claimed, at the time, to be the largest set in European cinema history. Some of the thugs were actual neo-Nazis, led by real-life Russian fascist Maksim Martsinkevich, who would later be imprisoned for posting racist videos, investigated for murder and, in 2020, found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide.

Cameras rolled as the building burned. They continued to roll as the crew held a party on location, amid the ashes, with an open bar and music courtesy of electronic musicians Peaches and DJ Spooky.

For three years before that night, the set had functioned less like a traditional backlot than a sealed micro-state. If you believe the rumors — and much of what is known about this project is only speculation — participants were required to wear authentic 1930s to 1960s-era clothing, right down to their underwear.

They ate Soviet-style food, bought bread from the institute cafe with newly minted Soviet-era rubles and smoked Soviet cigarette brands. Anachronisms were banned: No mobile phones, no internet, no laptops. Women were reportedly forbidden to use modern tampons. All news came from a fully staffed on-set newspaper and radio station. The KGB officers were played, in some cases, by actual former KGB officers, and they could detain and interrogate other cast members.

Not everything was filmed and recorded, but a lot was. Some 700 hours of footage, shot on 35mm film, and around 8,000 hours of recorded dialogue.

None of that was the original plan, however. The initial idea, when a 29-year-old Russian director named Ilya Khrzhanovsky pitched it in 2006, was for a fairly conventional art house biopic of Landau — the recipient of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics, who was nicknamed “Dau” — financed by the European Union funding body Eurimages with German and Swedish support. What it became instead was Dau: a two-decade multimedia leviathan that has so far yielded more than a dozen experimental films, art installations in Paris and London, an aborted plan to rebuild the Berlin Wall, a ban in Russia for creating “pornographic propaganda,” accusations of abuse and exploitation, and a mythology so dense that the work itself all but disappeared behind it.

The Dau project became one of cinema’s great ghost stories. Akin to Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind or Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote — films that traded for decades on the mystique of never quite existing.

For 20 years, the tales and whispers have circulated about the “mad Russian” director and his experiment. Some called it a “Stalinist Truman Show” or “Big Brother in period costume.” Some of the rumors, and a few of the reports at the time, paint Khrzhanovsky as a tyrant who went mad with power, like Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (or maybe Francis Ford Coppola making Apocalypse Now).

But Khrzhanovsky’s original idea, for an epic biopic on the life of Landau, never completely disappeared though. The filmmaker kept the footage he shot in Kharkiv between 2008 and 2011 — all 700 hours of it — and left it in a fridge for more than a decade. Now, 20 years later, the “mother film,” as Khrzhanovsky calls it, the biopic that spawned the leviathan, is finally finished.

The 165-minute movie, titled simply DAU, premieres in competition at the Venice Film Festival this month. “[The new film] is more or less the model I wrote almost 20 years ago and that we filmed, starting from 2008,” Khrzhanovsky, now 51, explains via video call from Paris, where he’s completing postproduction with characteristic last-minute intensity. “[But] I didn’t really touch this movie from the moment when I finished the shoot [in 2011] until December 2023, when I started to edit and reorganize the material and find a new cinematic language for it.”

Lev Landau makes for an unlikely epic hero, but his life offers up plenty of cinematic drama. A prodigy who started college at 14 and published major works on quantum theory before his 20th birthday, Landau worked with pioneering physicist Niels Bohr and, in 1937, was named head of the theoretical division of the secretive Institute for Physical Problems in Moscow. He was reportedly as experimental in his private life as in his physics, including practicing polyamory. At the height of the Soviet Terror, he was arrested for comparing Stalin to Hitler but dodged the Gulag. Rehabilitated, he worked on the project to build the Soviet atom bomb. In 1962, in the same year he became a Nobel Laureate, a crippling car crash left him bedridden until his death in Moscow in 1968.

Compared with the other films to have emerged from the Dau shoot — the more experimental films DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneratsiya were screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020 — the mother film DAU promises to be almost mainstream: a Doctor Zhivago-style epic, albeit with discussions of quantum mechanics and a fair bit of explicit sex thrown in.

It also arrives burdened by an entirely new scandal.

Ahead of the festival, the Ukrainian government took the unprecedented step of formally complaining to Venice for selecting the film for competition. “At the time when Russia is continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine, systematically destroying cities, cultural heritage and national identity, offering one of the world’s most prestigious cultural platforms to a project linked to the Russian state and its networks of influence sends a deeply worrying signal,” reads the joint Aug. 17 statement from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture and the Ukrainian embassy in Italy.

The statement goes on to list the film’s alleged connections to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, including Khrzhanovsky’s Russian identity; and that of lead actor Teodor Currentzis, the Greek-Russian classical conductor who plays Dau in the film. There is also the connection to Sergei Adoniev, the Russian oligarch who bankrolled the original shoot, and who has been sanctioned by both Ukraine and the U.S. for his alleged ties to Putin. Khrzhanovsky took to Facebook on Aug. 20 to post a point-by-point rebuttal of the criticisms, noting that “DAU is not an instrument of Russian state cultural policy. It is an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil.”

But speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, he says he understands the Ukrainian position.

“The war is the war, and I cannot judge the position of Ukrainians who are suspicious of a Russian who spent time in Ukraine,” he says. “I wanted to correct the lies because things like saying I represent the Russian state is literally not true. I think it was misunderstanding and misinterpretation. But I don’t want to judge. They should do whatever they need to do to win this war.”

The objection reflects how radically the perception of Khrzhanovsky’s Dau experiment has shifted over the course of two decades — from transcendent art project to exploitative scandal to, now, geopolitical lightning rod.

The Stalinist Truman Show

To understand the mythology of Dau, you have to go back to 2006. The year before, Khrzhanovsky had won a Tiger Award at Rotterdam for his first feature, the hallucinatory drama 4. In that film, three strangers — a meat merchant, a prostitute and a piano tuner — meet up in an all-night bar in Moscow. They all invent fake biographies and spend the evening telling made-up stories from their imagined pasts. After they separate, these fantasy realities begin to dominate their everyday lives.

Off the success of 4, Khrzhanovsky secured his European funding for what still looked like a straightforward Landau biopic. Everything changed when he met Adoniev and persuaded the Russian oligarch to bankroll the project. Adoniev had made his fortune in the mobile phone business; Forbes in 2017 estimated his wealth at $800 million. Freed from budgets, schedules and the ordinary logic of film financing, Dau the modest European art house movie mutated into a massive experiment designed to plunge participants — and, eventually, audiences — into the re-created horrors of the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

The filmmaker’s own audit reveals the staggering numbers behind the project, listing “392,000 auditions, 40,000 costumes, 12,000- square-meter set, 10,000 extras, 400 principle roles. 700 hours of 35mm film, 8,000 hours of recorded dialogue, 500,000 set photographs.”

The project attracted remarkable participants beyond its massive cast of extras. Currentzis, the acclaimed classical conductor, agreed to play Dau after meeting Khrzhanovsky socially in Moscow in 2005. Performance artist Marina Abramović and opera director Peter Sellars took on roles. Real Nobel Prize-winning physicist David Gross and acclaimed mathematician Shing-Tung Yau took working residencies in Kharkiv, conducting real science in period costume.

The idea behind the casting was to recruit to match the characters. So cleaners to play cleaners, academics to play scientists, even criminals and former KGB agents to play their Soviet equivalents.

The Movie That Ate Itself

In the three years of filming, only a handful of journalists were allowed inside “the institute.” Michael Idov spent several days there for a piece in GQ. He was allowed to move on and offset, given the official status of a “visiting foreign dignitary,” but required to dress in a three-piece suit and fedora and engage in period-appropriate small talk.

In his 2011 piece, Idov described Khrzhanovsky as “unhinged,” portraying him as a dictatorial director who turned his set into an oppressive totalitarian microsociety. Actors were not just expected to perform but to physically experience life under the Soviet regime.

“The real world was like a set to us,” Currentzis recalled in an interview with The Guardian in 2019. “We were sleeping and waking up and working in the clothes we had worn inside. When we were out, it was like visiting another time.” According to Currentzis, the reality of the Dau set was not always pleasant. “If the ‘KGB’ grabbed me, they could send me to jail. They could behave really badly to you,” he recalled. “I felt very uncomfortable many times, but it’s the same discomfort I feel in my own life. If we want to make something that is real, it has to be like real life.”

Not everyone experienced it as art.

Matthias Ganghofer, who worked as a first assistant cameraman on the Kharkiv shoot, would later stand up at a Berlin Film Festival press conference and say he found the experience on set “humiliating.” When he was caught using a cellphone, a violation of the project’s rules of historic authenticity, his name was marked on a blackboard for all to see. He claimed he left the project after three months. Khrzhanovsky says he fired him. “I fired a huge amount of people,” he adds.

Speaking to THR, Khrzhanovsky speaks of the periods on set where there was no filming but life in the institute continued as a kind of “extended rehearsal.” He downplays the more extreme elements of the experience, noting that, for example, KGB arrests and interrogations were always agreed upon in advance.

THR reached out to Currentzis, Ganghofer and several other members of the original Dau shoot for comment.

Lol Crawley, one of the three cameraman on DAU, was not on the Kharkiv shoot, but he remembers a demanding but happy production, and a director who never resembled the tyrant of the rumors. “Ilya was in control, like any good director, but was such a warm and generous person to work with,” he says.

The GQ article was headlined “The Movie Set That Ate Itself.” But it didn’t. Eventually the money simply ran out — Khrzhanovsky estimates Adoniev spent around 25 million euros, about $40 million in today’s money, before pulling the plug — and the set burned in that staged massacre of November 2011.

What survived was footage. Rather than cut one film from it, Khrzhanovsky began cutting many, along with a series of increasingly elaborate live installations built around the material. The first, in Paris in 2019, spread across the Théâtre du Châtelet and Théâtre de la Ville, immersing visitors in screening rooms, re-created Soviet interiors and hours of unseen footage.

“I’m absolutely, 100 percent sure that what we’re experiencing here will be in the history books of Paris, of art history, of scientific innovation, of cinema history,” said Ruth Mackenzie, artistic director of Théâtre du Châtelet, of the 2019 Paris exhibition, describing the multi-site project as a once-in-a-generation “game-changer.”

There was a plan to go further still, re-creating the Dau project in Berlin with an interactive exhibit that would have involved building a replica Berlin Wall in the German capital, creating a walled-in “city within a city.” Visitors would be required to purchase “visas” to enter and, once inside, it was promised, would experience life as it was in the old GDR. The project would end with a ritualistic tearing down of the wall on Nov. 9, 2018, 29 years to the day after the historic event in 1989.

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was set to build the wall. Artists like Abramović and Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer were involved. Brian Eno and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack also signed up.

“It’s the most extraordinary and multilayered art project I’ve ever heard of,” said Eno at the time. “You often hear things described as ‘ambitious.’ Nothing I’ve ever encountered comes close to the ambition of Dau.”

It never happened. Berlin authorities objected on safety grounds to the project. There were also complaints from locals at the cost — reportedly close to $8 million — and the idea of using taxpayer money to re-create a dictatorship. There was talk of a “Disneyfication” of Stalinism.

Over the years, bits and pieces of the Dau project have continued to emerge, in different forms. Last year, at the San Marco Art Centre in Venice from Sept. 5 to Nov. 23, Khrzhanovsky hosted the Dau exhibit The Quantum Effect, which featured footage shot in Kharkiv of scientists debating quantum and string theory.

The Scandals Begin

The first Dau films to emerge from the Kharkiv material, DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneratsiya — the former just over two hours, the latter more than six — screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020. DAU. Natasha, in competition, won a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution for cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, the man responsible for most of those 700 hours of footage. Both films sparked an uproar.

The controversy was hottest around DAU. Natasha. The film focuses on a cafeteria worker, played by Natalia Berezhnaya, and her colleague Olga (Olga Shkabarnya). They gossip, flirt with customers, and go out and get drunk. One evening after a roaring party, Natasha goes to bed with one of the institute scientists. She’s called in for questioning and torture by the KGB. The interrogation scene was the source of most of the controversy. Hatchet-faced officer Azhippo (played by Vladimir Azhippo, a former KGB officer) belittles and humiliates Natasha. In a particularly grim scene, he forces her to strip and insert a bottle into her vagina. Critics, assuming the scene wasn’t simulated, accused the production of sexual assault.

At the Berlin press conference, Khrzhanovsky was cagey and evasive when asked what in the film was “real” and what was staged for the camera.

But the actors all supported him. Everyone on set, Berezhnaya told reporters, was “in charge of our own senses and emotions. We were well aware of what we were doing.” She denied the rape charges unequivocally.

Cinematographer Jürges agreed. “In those scenes, we always had a safety vow. If somebody did not want to go along, we could stop at any time,” he says.

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“We didn’t work according to a screenplay; we were living our lives,” says Berezhnaya, though she reminds everyone that “we have amazing directors and amazing editors, and we are amazing actors.”

That didn’t stop the outrage. A letter, published on now-defunct Russian feminist film website KKBBD.com and signed by five Berlinale-accredited Russian journalists, called out the festival for including, in the wake of #MeToo, a film that “contains scenes of real psychological and physical violence against nonprofessional actors.”

Khrzhanovsky finds the allegations, particularly that of actual sexual assault, patently absurd. “[Berezhnaya] said it, she repeated it, and you can see it, if you just understand anything about anatomy, you see it isn’t real. But that story was there and got repeated and repeated,” he says. “Of course, it was an unusual way of filming, and having people play characters close to themselves [helped] them go further emotionally. But the whole time, you are on a set with a cameraman, a focus puller, a boom operator.”

Berezhnaya was nominated for a European Film Award for best actress, but the controversy around the movie meant “she couldn’t celebrate, couldn’t be celebrated,” according to Khrzhanovsky. “Monica Bellucci came up to her and said what an incredible performance it was,” he recalls, but such praise was drowned out by scandal. Russia banned the film as “pornographic propaganda,” while Western press largely dismissed it. Then COVID struck, and the film barely saw a release.

Looking back, it’s striking how the Dau films shown in Berlin were viewed through the lens of the #MeToo movement that had transformed Hollywood and cultural discourse. Stories that might once have been framed as the excesses of an avant-garde visionary — actors staying in character for months on end, living in Soviet-era quarters in period costume — now appeared as potential acts of exploitation and misuse of power. Interesting, too, how the project’s warnings about Russian totalitarianism, particularly stark in DAU. Degeneratsiya, and its discussions of art, philosophy, religion and quantum physics were largely overlooked at the time.

Now, the “mother film” DAU arrives with yet another interpretive framing: that of current Ukrainian politics.

The Political Context

The protests against DAU by the Ukrainian government ahead of this year’s Venice Film Festival highlight a dramatic shift in geopolitics, one that makes the project’s original context almost unrecognizable.

All the filming for DAU in Ukraine took place between 2008 and 2011, more than a decade before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. At that time, Russian-Ukrainian cultural collaborations were not only common but actively encouraged, with co-productions regularly receiving support from both countries’ film funding bodies.

Adoniev, the project’s main private funder, left the project years before he was sanctioned by Ukraine in 2022, and later by the U.S. in 2023, for his ties to Putin.

“When we started to make this project, it was a completely different reality,” Khrzhanovsky notes. “Russian-Ukraine co-productions were everywhere. People would move from here to there. It was a completely different reality.”

Khrzhanovsky’s own position vis-à-vis Russia has shifted just as dramatically. He has renounced his Russian citizenship in protest of the invasion of Ukraine, and holds British, German and Israeli passports. He set up the XZ Foundation with journalist Mikhail Zygar to counter Russian propaganda, mocking Putin’s description of the invasion as a “special operation.” As a result, he has been labeled a “foreign agent,” a designation used to target critics of the Putin regime. In Russia, Andrei Lugovoi, a member of the Duma and a former KGB agent, has called him a “master traitor” and accused him of “sabotage against Russia.”

The Ukrainian objections also focused on Currentzis, who lives and works in Russia as artistic director of the Perm State Opera and Ballet Theatre. He took Russian citizenship in 2014 and has never publicly denounced Putin’s war on Ukraine — factors that make him particularly controversial in the current climate.

“However one may judge his decision not to make such statements [against the war], judging a person on the basis of the citizenship they hold — and, even more so, using citizenship acquired years after most of the filming as evidence of the film’s current connection to the Russian state — is not justified,” Khrzhanovsky wrote in his Facebook post.

Speaking to the political turmoil around the film, the director takes the long view.

“Right now there is an emotional reaction mixed in with a need to protest the war, which I understand,” he says. “They need to stop the war, and if they want to destroy monuments, or forbid certain storytellers, that’s not my business.”

History, he suggests, has a way of changing the narrative.

“My Jewish mum was born in Ukraine and grew up there,” Khrzhanovsky says. “She was a Holocaust survivor and then moved to Uzbekistan, went back to Ukraine, then Moscow, and then Israel. Now she lives in Berlin. I grew up in the Soviet time when, in the movies about the Second World War, we didn’t say ‘Nazis,’ it was always ‘Germans.’ Now I hold a German passport. My mum too.”

“I believe soon we will see a more multidimensional picture of who we are, what we did, and what kind of world we live in,” he muses. “That was part of my task with this project — to create this picture, to create this model.”

Return of the Mother Film

Khrzhanovsky returned to the “mother film” three years ago, going back into the editing suite with funding from Germany, France and Sweden, plus Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund. Adoniev’s involvement with Dau, he says, ended in 2019. He still had the original material, and the original idea — Lev Landau and the Soviet Union from the 1930s through the 1960s — but his take on it had changed.

“[Returning to] the material, the way I describe it, is like cognac. The cask is time,” he explains. “The style of the movie, its language, how I edited it, has changed because of the 20 years in between.” Of course, he adds with a smirk, “a 20-year cognac could still be a shitty one.”

Ilya’s original idea of making a biographical film about Lev Landau had already changed after he cast Currentzis in the lead. His quantum physicist became Greek and his story started to diverge from Landau’s biography. The entire second half of the new film, Khrzhanovsky says, has “no connection whatsoever” to the life of the real Landau.

DAU is structured in three parts, each shot by a different cinematographer, representing different periods of Landau’s life. Revisiting the footage, Khrzhanovsky realized he had assembled, back in 2008, a team that would go on to define contemporary art cinema: veteran German cinematographer Jürgen Jürges, best known for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in Kharkiv and Moscow; the then-up-and-coming Brit Lol Crawley, later an Oscar winner for The Brutalist, in Saint Petersburg; and Manuel Alberto Claro, who would go on to shoot Melancholia and Nymphomaniac for Lars von Trier, in Kharkiv.

Crawley, the first cinematographer to shoot on the project, says the design was deliberate from the start: “Three different cinematographers, three different production designers, three different looks for the three different sections of the film,” Crawley tells THR. What he mostly remembers is the scale — “incredibly ambitious,” he says — and “these amazingly complex handheld sequences, where we had to reset and reset over and over again.”

All 700 hours of 35mm footage were kept in climate-controlled storage — “many years in Switzerland, then moved it” to a “fridge in Berlin.” It was all Fuji 400, a stock the company discontinued in 2010, which should have made the pickups he needed in 2023 impossible. But Khrzhanovsky had anticipated that.

Fuji agreed to produce the stock for one more year “just for us, just for Jürges,” he says. “I took that remaining stock and put it in the fridge with the rest of the 700 hours.” In 2024, he took out the reels and shot his additional scenes. “We filmed everything, down to the last meter.”

The aged stock had lost two stops of sensitivity, meaning the image on the old film was substantially darker, which had to be compensated for with additional lighting. Khrzhanovsky refuses to disclose which scenes come from the original shoot and which are the add-ons.

Khrzhanovsky, if you haven’t realized by now, is an obsessive. Dau hasn’t made him rich — he’s racked up huge debts, not least for storage — or particularly famous. He’s been called an abuser, a pornographer, a dictator and an agent of the Russian state. But he can’t let Dau go.

The Quantum Artist

In some ways, Khrzhanovsky was born for this. He comes from a film family — his father, Andrey, was an acclaimed director whose 1968 animated short, The Glass Harmonica, has the distinction of being the first animated movie banned in the U.S.S.R. (The film depicts a bleak, gray city controlled by greedy, corrupt authorities. Censors felt this was a bit too close to the reality of the ’60s Soviet Union.) Khrzhanovsky’s godfather was Soviet screenwriter and dramatist Sergei Yermolinsky, who was imprisoned and then sentenced to internal exile in Kazakhstan for “anti-Soviet activities” for offenses, including his friendship with dissident novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, and only freeed after iconic Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible) successfully petitioned for his release.

For Khrzhanovsky, the Soviet past he re-created in DAU is “part of my DNA.” Returning to the story of Landau, the physicist whose experiments changed our notion of the reality of time and space, felt, he says, like he was creating a “quantum picture” — where multiple realities — past, present and possible future — exist simultaneously.

“I started thinking about the me who began thinking of the project 20 years ago,” he says. “Then there are the real 20 years of my life, and of the lives of all the characters, the actors,” Khrzhanovsky reflects. “My life and the life of other characters are also part of the story of this process.” The whole Dau project, he says, “is much bigger than me,” but the film DAU, “this fictional story about society, about the relations between people,” he says, “belongs to me. I’m the author of this film.”

Khrzhanovsky’s “mother film” is clearly a different beast from his other Dau features. It’s more conventionally structured, more obviously cinematic. It includes massive set pieces not shown in the earlier movies: a hypnotic sequence of women on an assembly line, smashing up an endless stream of clay rabbits; huge crowds in period costume crossing a re-created St. Isaac’s Square in St. Petersburg/Leningrad; a gigantic Soviet propeller plane trudging across a vast field; piles and piles of rotten cabbages — Khrzhanovsky has said he used 70 tons for the single scene.

Crawley remembers one such sequence vividly: following Currentzis, as Dau, through the streets of Saint Petersburg carrying a red balloon, before he emerges into a square filled with dogs and fish, trams crashing, soldiers pouring out and destroying paintings and artworks. “It was incredibly ambitious,” he says.

Khrzhanovsky still wrestles with the mythology surrounding the Dau project. The reports and rumors, the endless stream of shifting scandals, have developed their own momentum, often overshadowing the actual work.

“That’s why I prefer to talk about this new movie, not the Dau project or the other films, and not about this or that rumor,” he says. “Just discussing or denying these things leads them to repeat and repeat. All the work gets dissolved in the lake of rumors.”

If the “mother film” DAU, so obviously a work of cinema and not a “Stalinist Truman Show,” had been the first work released, he admits, “the whole conversation would have been different.”

But he says he cannot look back or be concerned about how he or his films will be judged in the current historical moment. He knows too well how quickly that moment can change. “The historical perception is always changing,” he says.

“We see it with Israel. I hold an Israeli passport, and I still have the Israel flag on my Facebook. But I know what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. My son [the journalist and activist known as Andrey X] is one of the most influential bloggers on the West Bank, fighting with the state of Israel. That’s what I mean about a quantum picture.”

Whether Venice audiences will embrace this “quantum approach” to narrative remains to be seen. The film demands patience. “It’s not an easy movie. It’s not easy to watch. It’s long. It’s mostly in Russian language,” says Khrzhanovsky. “And it’s a complex story, but I think there are still a lot of people around the world who may be interested in watching this movie.”

The Feast That Never Ends

Khrzhanovsky insists he won’t be “doing Dau for the rest of my life.” But he is also, at present, still doing Dau. Eight Dau films are available on his bespoke VOD platform, dau.com, with five more listed as “upcoming releases.”

Many share the same characters and the same events, approached from different angles. DAU. New Man follows an institute experiment to engineer “perfect soldiers” by weeding weakness and empathy out of the new Soviet man. DAU. Sasha Valera is a May-October love story between two of the institute’s janitors.

That is the logic of the whole enterprise: 14 features to date (including the “mother film”), plus the installations and exhibitions — Khrzhanovsky mentions the possibility of a Dau book or books — all from a three-year shoot in Kharkiv. One set of events recut again and again into parallel worlds. This is what is meant by a “quantum project”, the same material suspended in several states at once, resolving only when somebody finally looks at it.

For 20 years, almost nobody has. DAU has existed as rumor rather than reality, scandal rather than art, shelved alongside cinema’s great ghost stories. Other movie ghosts, Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote or Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, eventually surfaced – in forms no one quite expected. In Venice, on Sept. 7, so will DAU.

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