“Dau”, interview with director Ilya Khrzhanovsky

In competition for the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival 2026, DAU follows a Greek-born physicist drawn into Soviet state service and the creation of one of history’s deadliest weapons, tracing, in director Ilya Khrzhanovsky‘s words, the small compromises that shape a life and alter the course of history. The film is the culmination of more than twenty years of work, uniting footage shot fifteen years ago with recent scenes into a single project. Khrzhanovsky talks about the long wait behind the film’s completion, his idea of cinema as experience rather than distraction, the criticism the film’s presence in Venice has drawn over its funding and origins, and what he believes the film says about Russia today.

Twenty years in the making, and fifteen years of waiting

On how it feels to premiere the final chapter of a project two decades in the making, Khrzhanovsky describes conflicting emotions: “I feel a mixed feeling of excitement, of course, and of course I’m worried. I am worried because I’m really worried how the connection between the movie and audience and the time, and time for me it’s a special thing”. That concern with time, he explains, is why he let years pass before returning to the footage: “I consciously took almost 15 years of making after the shoot because I want to look to the things what we filmed through the time”. Despite long stretches when the project’s completion was in doubt, he says he never lost faith in it: “During this journey there were a lot of moments where it was not clear if it could be completed or not, but I always knew that it will. And I knew that it will even if other people didn’t believe that it will ever finish. But I am very happy that universe, God, and reality gave me the chance”.

Cinema as an experience, not a distraction

Asked how he reconciles a long, reflective film with an era of fast content consumption, Khrzhanovsky relativizes the comparison: “Everything is relative. And if we will think about operas, and some Italian operas, they’re much longer than my movie”. He describes the film as something meant to be lived rather than simply watched: “My movie is not just a movie; I believe it’s also an experience, that’s what I tried to do during the process of making. An experience sometimes takes time”. For him, art’s power lies not in changing the world but in shifting something at the scale of individual choices: “The movie or art in general cannot change anything, cannot change the world, cannot keep the world survive, but can touch something in a scale of personal life and personal choices where you can feel something about yourself. And you can keep some more power and more energy to make decisions what can be more bright and beautiful than other decisions what you can also take”. That hope, he adds, requires acknowledging darkness rather than denying it: “There is no day without night. And if you are with a long night you need to believe that the day will come, but you cannot also deny the fact that the night exists. And you need to understand that this night exists inside yourself and not somewhere else, and then you can fight with that and then you can do something with yourself”.

Responding to the controversy

The film’s presence in Venice was criticized over its funding and origins, including a letter from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture. Khrzhanovsky rejects the word “criticism” itself: “I don’t see it like criticism; I think it’s like a mistake”. He frames the objection as understandable given the context, without accepting it: “They have their own agenda, and it’s logical that they have this agenda. They are in a bloody, terrible war which was started in 2022, and this war is already longer than the war between the USSR and Germany. It’s absolutely a terrible war and a huge tension, and sometimes they just don’t have enough time to research who and what”. He states his own position on the war, and on his relationship with Russia, in personal terms: “It doesn’t change any of my position and love and respect and wishes to Ukraine to survive and to be strong during this war, and I hope to win in this form or other form. […] In Russia, I don’t have Russian citizenship anymore, and I’m probably the only film director who is on the list of foreign agents, a kind of list of enemies of the Russian state. That’s my reality”. He closes the point by thanking the festival for its response: “I’m very thankful, of course, to Alberto Barbera and to the festival and to Biennale for the response they took”.

A Soviet DNA he says still poisons the present

Asked what his film says about Russia today, Khrzhanovsky traces a line back to the system’s founding decades, using language he chooses deliberately: “We’re talking about a kind of DNA of the Soviet totalitarian system, and this DNA was built in the 20s and 30s, and then 40s, in the time of Lenin and Stalin, and the way how they acted, how brutally they destroyed their own country and own citizens, because it was genocide against their own country”. That same self-destructive drive, in his view, persists today: “This inertia of self-destruction and destruction of other countries, and this inertia of imperial feeling in a kind of perverse way, is happening now. […] This kind of poison was spread around the world. Now we’re just seeing how this poison keeps reacting and poisoning neighbors without accepting the fact that they’re free”. He says he set out to place that dynamic within a wider picture: “Now we can focus on the story in Russia and Ukraine, but you can also look to the story of what’s going on on the 7th of October, what was with Iran, Israel, Palestinians, then we see what is boiling and could happen in Asia, we see what’s going on with right-wing movement in Europe and how dangerous it is. I tried just to talk about a more general thing and to give a feeling of danger of big apocalyptic destruction […] happening with us, with people, because all of us are as brothers and sisters and we should feel it as well”.

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