What happens when a group of people spend years in isolation, hard at work on a project that seems to be one part film shoot, one part roleplaying and one part conceptual art? While this might sound like something from the great 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, it is in fact very real — and something that’s resulted in a number of movies that can be now be watched from the comfort of your own home. The case of Dau, however, may be one in which the story of how the film was made is more gripping than the film itself.
A 2018 article by Kate Erbland at IndieWire noted that rumors about the film’s production offered conflicting details. Had the shoot been in the works for 2 years? For 12? But even the uncontested details about the project sounded overwhelmingly bizarre:
… at some point in the early aughts, Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky decamped to the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, where he set up something — he calls it The Institute — in the outskirts of town. He hired people (lots of people) to partake in his vision, which involved recreating ’50s and ’60s Moscow on a massive scale, a full city crafted from nothing and populated with willing participants.
The project’s reputation has increased from there, for good and for ill. A 2019 article in The Guardian cited everything from the making of Apocalypse Now to the Stanford Prison Experiment. A Hyperallergic article about the films’ debut noted that applicants to see them were required to “fill out a confidential questionnaire about your psychological, moral, and sexual history.” To say that it sounds like a lot would be an understatement for the ages.
At Polygon, Siddhant Adlakha looked at the first two parts of the film cycle to be available to stream — Dau. Natasha and Dau. Degeneration. Adlakha makes a convincing case that the films themselves crossed several moral and ethical lines in their production. Director llya Khrzhanovsky comes under particular criticism:
By Khrzhanovsky’s own admission, Dau featured real physical and psychological violence against his non-professionals, and even unsimulated sex under the influence of alcohol. The project, and the resulting films, are aberrant forms of art.
Adlakha writes that “as movies fueled by an unhinged, perhaps even unparalleled creative ego, they’re fascinating documents of the various shady modes of production the public has begun to drag into the sunlight over the last few years.” That films dealing with the techniques used by the KGB would be made through ethically dubious means is profoundly unsettling. But the analysis provided by Adlakha makes for gripping reading — and serves a welcome point of discussion for the harrowing ways in which creative works can be made.
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