Dau premieres at Venice amid Ukraine controversy

Ilya Khrzhanovsky's film “Dau” premiered Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival amid controversy after Ukraine's government accused it of being linked to the Russian state and its influence networks, an accusation the filmmaker denies.

The film, which runs for more than three hours, follows physicist Lev Landau across decades of Soviet totalitarianism. Khrzhanovsky began the project two decades ago and filmed for three years in Kharkiv, Ukraine, between 2008 and 2011.

Khrzhanovsky told AFP he wanted to examine scientists who believed they would change the world but ended up creating “the most terrible weapon”. Landau, a 1962 Nobel Prize winner in physics, was forced by Soviet authorities to work on the Russian nuclear bomb.

The filmmaker said he renounced Russian citizenship in 2024 to protest the Ukraine war and now lives in Paris. He also said he took financing for the wider project from Russian billionaire Sergei Adoniev before Adoniev was targeted by US sanctions over the war.

Ukraine's government has also criticised Khrzhanovsky for filming Kharkiv as a Soviet city while the city is now under Russian bombardment.

Khrzhanovsky said he used criminals and ex-criminals in an improvised trial scene and hired real neo-Nazis for the film's final scenes. At a Venice press conference, he said art cannot change the world but may give people energy to survive spiritually and emotionally.