DAU Director Defends Film Against Ukrainian Government Calls to Bar It From Venice
Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has issued a point-by-point rebuttal to the government of Ukraine, which is demanding the Venice Film Festival drop his film DAU from its competition line-up on the grounds that it amounts to Russian propaganda.
Khrzhanovsky posted a detailed statement on Facebook on Thursday addressing the criticism. "DAU is not a Russian film," he wrote, "and does not represent Russia at the Venice Film Festival." He said he is not a citizen of the Russian Federation, having renounced his Russian citizenship in protest against state policy and the war against Ukraine. He described the film as "an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil," not an instrument of Russian state cultural policy The Hollywood Reporter.
Earlier this week, Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture, and the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy issued a joint statement, published on 17 August 2026, criticising Venice for including DAU. The statement said offering one of the world's most prestigious cultural platforms to a project linked to the Russian state "sends a deeply worrying signal" while Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine Interfax Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government's statement listed alleged connections to Vladimir Putin's Russia, including Khrzhanovsky's citizenship, that of lead actor Teodor Currentzis, and the involvement of Sergei Adoniev, a Russian businessman sanctioned by both Ukraine and the United States The Hollywood Reporter.
Khrzhanovsky addressed the Adoniev connection directly. He said Adoniev financed part of the broader DAU project but that his financing ended completely in 2019, before Adoniev was sanctioned by either government, and that Adoniev did not finance the specific film selected for Venice's competition The Hollywood Reporter.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera has also pushed back. He took to Instagram on Wednesday to defend the selection, describing Khrzhanovsky as a Russian dissident who landed on the regime's blacklist as a terrorist and enemy of the state and who has opposed the invasion of Ukraine from the start. Barbera called the attacks on DAU "an inexplicable smear campaign against a film that its accusers have evidently not even seen yet" Variety.
The three-hour DAU is the latest instalment in a sprawling body of work. The project began as a biopic of Nobel Prize-winning Soviet physicist Lev Landau, nicknamed Dau, and grew into a massive immersive experiment: hundreds of cast members lived on a closed set in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in costume and in character for three years of filming from 2008 to 2011. An earlier cut, DAU. Natasha, screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020 and won a Silver Bear for cinematographer Jürgen Jürges The Hollywood Reporter.
Russia itself banned the film. Authorities there labelled it "pornographic propaganda" The Guardian.
So the film now headed for Venice's competition is opposed by both Russia, which has banned it, and Ukraine, which wants it pulled from the festival. Khrzhanovsky's defence rests on the claim that the work belongs to neither state.
