Khrzhanovsky's DAU Returns to Venice, and Finally Finds Lev Landau

VENICE — Ilya Khrzhanovsky's DAU project, the long-running and much-discussed Soviet-era experiment that has occupied the director for roughly twenty years, has arrived at the Venice Film Festival with a new instalment that finally centres on the man whose life inspired the whole enterprise: the Soviet physicist Lev Landau. The Guardian's Venice review describes the film as a 'crazed Soviet inferno' that at last focuses on 'the genius maudit who inspired the series'.

For readers who have followed DAU only at a distance, the project's scale is the story as much as any single film. Khrzhanovsky has spent years and, by the Guardian's account, millions of dollars reconstructing a Soviet world in which actors lived for extended periods, blurring the line between documentary, fiction and historical re-enactment. The Guardian's critic frames the newest chapter as the moment the sprawling cycle turns to its originating subject rather than the surrounding apparatus.

The Venice premiere places the film in the same festival edition that has drawn attention for a four-hour Elon Musk documentary by Alex Gibney, a Barbara Kopple film on US delivery workers, and Florian Zeller's Bunker with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. For the Biennale's film section, the mix is familiar: auteur projects with years of production behind them sharing the Lido with star-driven premieres.

The Guardian's review is notably wary of the project's methods even as it acknowledges its ambition. The critic's comparison — what if Christopher Nolan had become sidetracked while making Oppenheimer and spent two decades and vast sums pursuing something else entirely — captures the sense in which DAU sits apart from conventional biography. Landau, a Nobel laureate in physics, is the figure at the centre, but the film's interest, as the Guardian reads it, lies in the feverish reconstruction around him rather than in a conventional account of his work.

That framing matters for how the project has been received outside Russia. DAU has been discussed in the international press less as a film than as an event: a durational installation, a set of parallel features, a controlled environment in which participants lived under Soviet conditions. The Guardian's Venice piece treats the new instalment as a further chapter in that ongoing argument, not a conclusion to it.

For the Cultura desk, the Venice competition this week has been unusually crowded with long-gestation projects. Alongside DAU, the festival has shown Kopple's Union Town, an exposé of app-based delivery workers and unionisation efforts at Amazon, and Zeller's Bunker, which the Guardian judged unable to overcome its own shallowness despite its leads. The Khrzhanovsky film, by contrast, arrives with an audience already primed by years of coverage and debate.

What the foreign press has not settled is whether DAU's method — the reconstruction, the duration, the blurring of document and performance — produces insight into Landau or simply into its own making. The Guardian's review leans toward the latter reading while crediting the film's intensity. That tension is likely to follow the project to its next screening.

Venice's role as the first stop for such work is itself part of the story. The festival has a long record of premiering films whose production histories are as discussed as their content, and the international critics who cover the Lido tend to arrive with those histories already in hand. For Italian audiences, the practical question is distribution: whether a project of this scale and shape reaches cinemas, festivals or streaming platforms after its Venice run, and on what terms.