Virtual Friday Night Films at the Wende: Dau

Filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky (son of animator Andrei Khrzhanovsky) originally conceived of Dau as a biopic about Soviet physicist Lev Landau (nicknamed “Dau”) and the secret research institute where he worked from the late 1930s until his death in 1968. The project mushroomed into an ambitious experiment shot from 2009 to 2011 on a vast set in Ukraine. Thousands of extras and hundreds of non-professional actors, some of whom lived at the institute, participated in the largely unscripted production. Journalists have often called the controversial project the “Stalinist Truman Show” and have compared it to other film productions that have spiraled out of control like Apocalypse Now.

The result is a series of thirteen feature films, two of which premiered last year at the Berlin Film Festival. They combine elements of art film, performance art, and reality TV (but shot by cinematographer Jürgen Jürges on 35mm), and range from the grisly six-hour epic Dau. Degeneration to more restrained personal stories. We recommend Dau. String Theory, which follows a scientist (played by real-life physicist Nikita Nekrasov) as he debates the beauty of string theory, as well as his attempts to explain his theory of free love to a series of women.

Recommended reading:

Daily Beast: Inside the Weird World of ‘DAU’: A Soviet ExperimentThat Became the Most Controversial Film in Years

The Guardian: DAU. Degeneration review – shocking, six-hour satire of Soviet science

New York Times Review: The Berlinale Unveils 8 Hours of‘DAU.’ It’s Just the Beginning.

Mubi Notebook Reviews of the Films

For more about the history of real-life Soviet scientific communities, watch the Wende’s Cold War Spaces talk Shadow Space: Soviet Secret Cities in Transition: A Conversation with Xenia Vytuleva-Herz and Joes Segal.

A new film is currently being released every week to stream on Dau.com for $3 each.

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Virtual Film Picks are inspired by the in-person Friday Night Films at the Wende program series. This selection is part of a curated list of weekly movie suggestions that can be watched at home, in conjunction with #WendeOnline.