DAU
Germany, France, Sweden
2026 | 195 min. | Fiction

Inspired by the life of Soviet physicists who created the atomic bomb, DAU tells the story of a brilliant Greek-born physicist living in the USSR from 1928 to 1968. Driven to understand the laws of the universe, Dau is soon forced to use his genius in service of the state and help create the deadliest weapon in history. In a secret research institute, everyday life is shaped by scientific dominance, power, surveillance and privilege. Increasingly stripped of his autonomy, Dau attempts to find freedom and happiness outside his marriage through an endless succession of affairs, ultimately losing both himself and his ability to love. Spanning four transformative decades, DAU is both an intimate portrait of one man and a monumental fresco of a society shaped by violence and ideology. It is a saga about the search for happiness, the price of freedom, and the countless everyday compromises that quietly shape both a human destiny and the course of history.

Directed by: Ilya Khrzhanovskiy
Written by: Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Vladimir Sorokin, Susanne Marian
Produced by: Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, Philippe Bober, Leonid Lebedev, Solal Coutard, Susanne Marian, Svetlana Dragayeva, Erik Hemmendorff
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges, Manuel Alberto Claro, Lol Crawley
Editing: Ilya Permiakov, Rob Myers
Production Design: Denis Shibanov, Olga Gurevich, Boris Shapovalov
Costume Design: Alexandra Timofeeva, Irina Tsvetkova, Lyubov Mingazitinova, Elena Bekritskaya, Olga Bekritskaya
Make-Up & Hair: Jekaterina Örtel
Sound: Kirill Vasilenko, Elena Gurvich, Rob Myers, Maksym Demydenko, Guillaume Bouchateau
Visual Effects: Dasha Sherman
Casting: Anastasia Smekalova, Inna Kovalyova, Vera Levchenko, Zoya Popova, Anton Studennikov
Cast: Teodor Currentzis (Dau), Radmila Shchogolieva (Nora), Anatoly Vasiliev (Krupitzsa), Maria Nafpliotou (Maria), Dmitri Tcherniakov (Shubnikov), Dmitry Cheglakov (Koretz), Demian Kudryavtsev (Zlatogorov)

Statement of the director:
The film DAU is the culmination of more than twenty years of work. It brings together material shot more than fifteen years ago with scenes created in recent years, transforming them into a single, unified work. Shaped by time itself, the film could only have been made today.

The starting point was my interest in the human being — in our ability to love, to create and to be free, to make moral choices and to experience happiness in a world where a totalitarian system gradually changes human nature itself.

I chose a Greek as the protagonist. The Greeks, as representatives of a pre-Christian civilization, had completely different foundations of morality and ethics from our own. Greek tragedy unites fate and freedom: destiny exists as a higher order, yet it is fulfilled through countless, almost imperceptible human actions.

Contemporary physics was the project's core conceptual reference, from which the language of the film emerged. By dividing the film into several parts, three different cinematographers, production designers and costume designers created three independent visual worlds. Along with them, the composition, light, colour, sound, rhythm, camera movement and the very nature of the actors' existence change as well. Documentary, dream, vision and historical memory became equal states of a single reality, paralleling quantum physics. A reality in which time and space are no longer linear or fixed.

The same principle drove the casting process. The film was shot over four years with thousands of extras who were characters of time. Their physicality, speech, gaze, the way they moved and the way they remained silent shaped the dramaturgy of the frame no less than script.

In the film DAU, the world is constructed with almost archaeological precision while simultaneously existing according to the free laws of art. I sought to create a cinematic experience in which after the film ends, the experience does not end, with light, sound, space, rhythm, the body and time acting upon both the conscious and the unconscious mind of the viewer, continuing to live within them after the film has ended.

Production:
Coproduction Office
https://www.coproductionoffice.eu

Press/social media agency:
PR Factory