Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has publicly defended his film DAU after Ukraine's government branded it Russian propaganda and demanded it be pulled from the Venice Film Festival next month. In a Facebook post, Khrzhanovsky rejected the accusations, stressing that he has renounced his Russian citizenship in protest at the war and that the film is "an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil" rather than an arm of Russian state cultural policy.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture and its Italian embassy issued a joint statement this week condemning Venice for including DAU, citing alleged links between the film, its financiers, actor Teodor Currentzis and sanctioned Russian businessman Sergei Adoniev. Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera has also come to the film's defence, calling Khrzhanovsky a Russian dissident blacklisted by Moscow and dismissing the criticism as a "smear campaign" from people who haven't seen the film. DAU began as a biopic of Soviet physicist Lev Landau and evolved into a sprawling immersive project shot over three years in Kharkiv, with hundreds of cast members living in character on a closed set; the new three-hour feature is the latest instalment to emerge from that footage.