Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s loose biopic of the famous Russian physicist Lev Lendau is the kind of epic feature (195 minutes) that rarely happens anymore–socio-historical and yet personal.
The shoot relocated hundreds of actors and thousands of extras inside a giant simulacrum of the Soviet era, their daily interactions captured by roving teams of camera and sound technicians.
Inspired by the lives of Soviet physicists who developed the atomic bomb, the film follows the brilliant scientist Dau across four decades of life in the Soviet Union, from 1928 to 1968.
A co-production of Germany, France, Sweden, and Russia, it assembles footage shot between 2008 and 2011, with additional material filmed in 2024, the production spanned more than two decades.
As the director puts it, “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.”
The film had its world premiere in the main competition of the 2026 Venice Film Fest, where Khrzhanovsky won the Silver Lion for Best Director.
The action unfolds largely inside a closed Soviet research institute, where scientific hierarchy, privilege and constant surveillance define the daily existence.
As his room for independent action narrows, Dau seeks release in a succession of affairs outside his marriage, a pattern that costs him his attachments and his sense of self.
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.
Highly original, this labor of love concerns a brilliant man crushed by a totalitarian regime. DAU is both an intimate portrait of one man and a monumental fresco of a society shaped by rigid ideology.
