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. The Greeks, as representatives of a pre-Christian civilization, had completely different foundations of morality and ethics 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. By dividing the film into several parts, three 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’ existence change as well. Documentary, dream, vision and historical memory became equal states of a single reality, paralleling 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 were characters of time. Their physicality, speech, gaze, the way they moved and the way they remained silent shaped the dramaturgy of the frame no less than script.

In the film 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 in which after the film ends, the experience does not end, with light, sound, space, rhythm, the body and time acting upon both the conscious and the unconscious mind of the viewer, continuing to live within them after the film has ended.

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 selected for the Official Selection of the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival. DAU. Natasha received the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Jürgen Jürges’ cinematography.

Khrzhanovsky renounced his Russian citizenship in 2024 and is a citizen of Germany, the United Kingdom and Israel. 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.