# Inside ‘DAU,’ the 20-Year Soviet Simulation That Became Cinema’s Strangest Ghost Story

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/inside-dau-the-20-year-soviet-simulation-that-became-cinemas-strangest-ghost-story/
- Published: 2026-09-08T13:05:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-09-08T13:32:54+00:00
- Original publisher: The Hollywood Reporter
- Original article: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/dau-venice-film-festival-ilya-khrzhanovsky-1236686499/
- Topics: Art, Culture, Entertainment, Europe, Film, Horror, Offbeat, Paranormal, Weird & Viral, World

## Key points

- Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 20-year Soviet simulation film DAU premieres at Venice
- Project involved thousands living under real 1930s-60s Soviet conditions
- Original 2011 footage shelved for years, now finished as a 165-minute film

## Summary

Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky's long-mythologised film project DAU is finally arriving at the Venice Film Festival, two decades after he began building a sealed, fully functioning recreation of a Soviet research institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine. What started in 2006 as a conventional biopic of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau, nicknamed "Dau", spiralled into an immersive, controversial experiment in which thousands of participants lived under authentic period conditions for years, generating multiple spin-off films, art installations and persistent allegations of abuse and exploitation.

Participants reportedly wore only 1930s-60s clothing, ate Soviet-style food and were cut off from modern technology, while some former KGB officers played their real-life roles and could detain fellow cast members. Around 700 hours of 35mm footage and 8,000 hours of dialogue were recorded, including a 2011 scene in which the set was set alight by real neo-Nazis, one of whom later died in prison. Khrzhanovsky kept his original biopic footage, shot between 2008 and 2011, in storage for over a decade before finishing the 165-minute "mother film", titled simply DAU, which premieres in competition at Venice this month amid renewed controversy over its Russian origins.

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