- Soundtrack
by F.D.S.
When music stops being a backdrop and rewrites the soul of cinema: all the winners
Inspired by the life of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau, the film unfolds inside a massive laboratory set built in Kharkiv, where hundreds of people lived and worked for years under a simulated Soviet regime. Through this unprecedented social and cinematic experiment, Khrzhanovsky paints an intimate portrait of a man and, at the same time, a sweeping fresco of a society shaped by violence and totalitarianism, exploring the boundary between fiction, reality and the conditioning of the individual.
A Russian filmmaker who renounced his country’s citizenship in 2024, Ilya Khrzhanovsky made his debut with 4 (2004), awarded at Rotterdam, before embarking in 2008 on the monumental DAU project in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Khrzhanovsky constructed “The Institute”: spanning 12,000 square meters, it became the largest film set ever created in Europe. Originally conceived as a film on the life of Lev Landau, the project evolved into a total installation – an immersive experience spanning over twenty years of shooting and re-editing. From this visual archive, several feature films emerged, including DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration, both premiered at the 2020 Berlinale. With DAU, he makes his debut in Competition at Venice.
