Ilya Khrzhanovsky

He is the grandson of artist and actor (1905—1987).

The architecture, costumes, objects and food created a phantasmagorical reconstruction of the Soviet era of the 1930s to 1960s.

Everyone, with the exception of Dau (conductor Teodor Currentzis), his wife (actress Radmila Schegoleva), their son (as young adult - musician Nikolai Voronov), and Krupitsa, director of the institute from 1938 to 1953 (theater director Anatoly Vasiliev), lived in the Institute under their own names.

Their real biographies were adapted to Soviet realities.

Among the employees and the guests of the Institute there were theoretical physicists, neuroscientists and biologists, including Profs.

Nobel laureate David Gross, Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau, Nikita Nekrasov, Dmitry Kaledin, Andrey Losev, Samson Shatashvili, Carlo Rovelli, Eric Verlinde, James H. Fallon, and media and performance contemporary artists including Marina Abramović, Carsten Höller, Boris Mikhailov, Peter Sellars, Romeo Castellucci, Alexei Blinov, Rav Steinsaltz, Peruvian shaman Guillermo Arévalo and others.

The process resulted in 700 hours of 35mm film.

His father Andrei Khrzhanovsky (b. 1939) is one of the top Russian animation directors, and his mother Mariya Neyman, a philologist and script editor.

Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky (Илья́ Андре́евич Хржановский; born 11 August 1975) is a Russian-born film director, screenwriter, film producer and member of the European Film Academy.

Khrzhanovsky attended the Bonn Academy of Fine Arts (1992–1993) and the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (1998) (VGIK).

His directorial debut was the stage production of What I Feel («То, что чувствую») at the Kukart Festival at Peterhof in 1997.

In 1998 he co-directed together with Artyom Mikhalkov the short movie Stop («Остановка»).

Between 1998 and 2002, Khrzhanovsky worked as a director and producer in commercial advertising and created The List of Lovers of the RF for the Russian TNT Channel, a series directed by leading Russian movie directors.

In 2003, the project was included in the Berlin International Film Festival programme, as well as other notable Russian and international film festivals.

In 2005 Khrzhanovsky co-founded Phenomen Films production company.

In 2006 Khrzhanovsky launched the DAU project and has since been producing and directing films and other products for it.

Since 2007 Khrzhanovsky has permanently resided outside of Russia, in Germany, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Phenomen Films developed and produced the critically acclaimed film Paper Soldier (2008) by Aleksei German Jr, that won among others the Silver Lion for Best Direction and Golden Osella for Best Cinematography at the 65th Venice Film Festival.

It was also nominated for European Cinematographer at the European Film Awards.

In 2008 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the largest shooting location in Europe spanning 12,000m2, named the institute, was constructed as part of the project.

How the location functioned and was used in the filming has suggested parallels between DAU and such projects as Synecdoche, New York and The Truman Show.

The auditions for DAU involved 392,000 non-actors.

Around 200-300 non-actors lived on-set at any one time and around 400 were filmed including scientists, musicians, artists, composers, religious leaders and philosophers, as well as waitresses, cleaners, secret police officers, cooks and hairdressers.

40,000 costume units were produced and purchased during shooting.

In 2009 Khrzhanovsky co-founded Phenomen-Ukraine and in 2010 co-founded Phenomen Berlin Filmproduktions GmbH (Germany).

Khrzhanovsky directed the film 4 earning him several awards including a Golden Cactus and Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, Best Director Prize at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Grand Jury Prize as Best New Director at the Seattle International Film Festival, Best Film and Best Camera Prize at the Transylvania International Film Festival, Best Director Prize at the Athens International Film Festival and a nomination for the Fassbinder Award.

It was included in official programs of more than 50 international film festivals including Venice Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Los Angeles Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival.

4 was distributed in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and also Scandinavian and South Asian countries.

The unscripted process was filmed intermittently from October 2009 to November 2011 during which no modern clothes including underwear, no modern sanitary products or any other modern objects or vocabulary were allowed on the set and period costume, make-up and hairstyles were required from everyone including the crew, regardless if shooting was occurring.

With no script or takes, the characters acted and reacted in the meticulously designed circumstances, sometimes staying on set for months.

In March 2014 he signed the open letter "We are with you!"

issued by the Russian Film Union KinoSoyuz in support of Ukraine, and since February 2022 has consistently opposed

the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

DAU is a multidisciplinary project at the intersection of cinema, art and anthropology that premiered in Paris in 2019.

DAU was initially conceived as a full-length feature film about the life of a genius in troubled times loosely based on the biography of the Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau (nicknamed Dau).

However the filming process transformed into a 'total performance' and 'total installation' rather than a conventional film shoot.

13 films of various genres edited from this material were part of the premiere in Paris in 2019.

The movies were voiced by Gérard Depardieu, Willem Dafoe, Isabelle Adjani, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Charlotte Rampling, Hanna Schygulla, Vicky Krieps, Jella Haase, Lars Eidinger, Blixa Bargeld, Denis Lavant, and others.

From 2020 to 2023 Khrzhanovsky worked as the Artistic Director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

As of March 2022, he is in Israel.