Venice Biennale Defends Controversial Film Amid ‘Profound Concern’ From Ukraine

The Venice Biennale and the Russian-born director of a controversial film due to premiere early next month at the Venice International Film Festival have pushed back against a statement of “profound concern” from Ukraine’s ministries of culture and foreign affairs. 

A joint statement from the ministries, published on 17 August, linked the film, titled Dau, to alleged “Russian state and… influence networks”, and accused the Venice festival of “implicitly legitimising Russia’s attempts to erase and appropriate Ukraine’s history and cultural identity” through its inclusion.

The film’s director, Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, has denied the Ukrainian ministries’ claims and said in a statement shared with Ocula on 20 August that they contain “factually incorrect assertions and substantial distortions”. 

The Venice Biennale—which oversees both the film festival and the art exhibition—also upheld its decision to include the film. In an official statement seen by Ocula on 18 August, the governing body defended Dau’s contents and reasserted that it would “never” exclude participants from its events “on the basis of geographical origin and nationality”.

Khrzhanovskiy’s 195-minute film has been more than 20 years in the making. Although it began life as a biopic of the Nobel-prize winning Russian physicist Lev Landau (“Dau”), it transformed into a multi-part epic that blends documentary reality and dreamlike fiction, where “time and space are no longer linear and fixed”, according to the director. 

Set during the repressive Soviet regime, the film explores Dau’s psychological unraveling alongside efforts to find freedom and happiness through a stream of extramarital affairs between the late 1930s and his death in 1968. 

The 17 August statement from the Ukrainian ministries blasted the biennale for platforming Dau within the international cultural community, arguing that, amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, it sends a “deeply troubling” message that international institutions are willing to “tolerate Russia’s crimes”.

While acknowledging the festival’s “curatorial independence and artistic judgment”, the statement insisted that “culture cannot be viewed in isolation from politics or assessed solely on artistic merit”.  It called on the biennale and other respected international cultural platforms to recognise how Russia “weaponises culture” and to stop “mistaking Kremlin-backed cultural projects for politically neutral ones”.

In a detailed response to the allegations, Khrzhanovskiy told Ocula that the Ukrainian government’s statement was “painful”, and emphasised that he is a vocal opponent of Russia’s war in the country. 

The director said he has renounced his Russian citizenship in protest and, in 2024, was added by Russia’s ministry of justice to a list of “foreign agents” because of his work with a non-profit organisation created to counter Russian propaganda. Records reviewed by Ocula from human rights organisation OVD-Info confirm that Khrzhanovskiy was placed on this list in 2024 for the stated reason of disseminating “fake information” and for speaking against the war in Ukraine.

An immersive psychological experiment

Filmed largely inside a vast replica of a Soviet research institute built by the film’s production team in an abandoned swimming pool in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv between 2009–2011, the Dau project became infamous due to its inclusion of thousands of extras, who were instructed to live there as Soviet citizens as faithfully as they could, both on- and off-screen.

Some 700 hours of footage was captured over four years, and there has been as much attention on this unscripted background as to the hermetic film project itself. Sometimes described as an immersive psychological experiment, it attracted the interest of real-life scientists and various artists—including Marina Abramović, Carsten Höller and theatre director Peter Sellars—who either visited or took up temporary residence inside the set. 

More than a dozen feature films have already been made and released using the project’s footage: docu-fictions following different plotlines within the institute, including 2020’s Dau.Natasha. The drama follows the head of the institute’s cafeteria, who is tortured by the KGB over her relationship with a French scientist. 

Released the same year, Dau.Degeneration (2020) is a satire that chronicles a KGB-sponsored clampdown on perceived “degeneracy” within the institute, that ultimately ends in a full-scale purge and the murder of its staff. 

The presence of un-simulated sexual and violent scenes in some Dau installments has attracted opprobrium from some critics, while several of the films are reportedly banned in Russia. Khrzhanovskiy has also defended what was sometimes described as an oppressive atmosphere on set as necessary to the authenticity of the encyclopedic production.

The Dau being shown in Venice is the “mother film”. Following the saga’s main plotline and lead character, it combines footage from the immersive project with some scenes filmed in recent years, with finishing touches still being added to the production as late as last week.

“Imperial narrative”

Among the specific concerns raised by the Ukrainian letter was the film’s alleged financing by Sergei Adoniev, a Russian businessman sanctioned by both the United States and Ukraine. The biennale has contradicted this, stating that the film is a German production, with France and Sweden as co-producing countries, and that it was financed by European cultural TV channel Arte, German broadcaster WDR, the Swedish Film Institute and the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund.

Khrzhanovskiy has said that while Adoniev did finance the broader Dau project between 2008–2019, before the sanctions were imposed on him, he has had no financial relationship with the project since, and did not finance the completion of the film included in the festival. 

The Ukrainian statement also alleged that the contents of the film reflect a Russian “imperial narrative”, because it portrays Kharkiv “exclusively through a Soviet lens, disregarding its own history and identity”. The director has pushed back against this characterisation, stating that depicting the Soviet period does not amount to “endorsing” the Soviet imperial system and describing one of the film’s central themes as the “destruction of individual freedom by that system”. 

Ukrainian officials also raised the alarm earlier this year after the biennale controversially permitted Russia’s return to its art exhibition for the first time since the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The decision caused international upset and resulted in the European Commission withdrawing a €2 million multi-year grant to the organisation.

The biennale has repeatedly defended its position, saying that it “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art”.