Ilya Khrzhanovskiy: The Future and the Present Coexist

Ilya Khrzhanovskiy, a prominent film director, artist and producer, held a Masterclass at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival. Particularly known for his experimentation with new media and contemporary art forms, he has been working for years on a large-scale multidisciplinary project called “DAU” that straddles the boundaries of film, theatre and anthropology. The project produced more than 700 hours of material, from which 14 feature-length films inspired by the biography of Soviet scientist and Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau were created. 

 

During the Masterclass, he shared details about this timeless undertaking with the audience, particularly focusing on the filming of the films “DAU.Natasha” and “DAU.Degeneration”, which, like his debut film “4”, are the focus of the Tribute to programme at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival. 

 

“At first it was a fairly conventional feature film, but when we started shooting and building the set, I suddenly realized that everything up to that point had been a mistake. I told the others about it, and after that I spent a year thinking about how to change the concept. I had two options: a historical approach or fantasy,” the director said about the beginnings of the project. 

 

“Lev Landau’s main theory was the theory of happiness. My starting point was the questions: what meaning is hidden behind a Soviet person? If a person has everything, what is his problem? What does it mean to be happy? How can we recognize happiness? How can we endure it?”, Khrzhanovskiy continued. 

 

Thus, the original premise of a feature film about a genius scientist was transformed into a project of enormous proportions and an immersive experiment for the needs of which a replica of a Soviet institute was built - the largest film set in Europe with an area of 12,000 m2. 

 

More than 300,000 people from everyday life auditioned for “DAU,” whom Khrzhanovskiy chose rather than professional actors, in order to blur the line between reality and imagination. Many of them lived their roles and stayed on set for 24 hours, but, as he says, this was not required of them and everyone could decide for themselves how they would approach the project. 

 

He drew inspiration for the set, costumes and colour scheme from Soviet avant-garde art, especially Kandinsky’s paintings, which he used to create moving perspective illusions. He wanted to create the most convincing reconstruction of the Soviet era from the 1930s to the 1960s, and used various tricks to achieve this. He brought tons of cabbage onto the set to create the appearance of human heads piled up, or, for example, used real criminals instead of actors in the courtroom scene. Another interesting fact is that the main actress in the film “DAU.Natasha” is actually a supermarket worker, where he found her, who continued to work after the film was finished. 

 

“We would mostly keep the actors’ real names and professions, but we would take them back in time a few decades,” said Khrzhanovskiy. This corps of amateur actors consisted of artists, scientists, musicians, philosophers, but also salespeople, waiters, cleaners, cooks, etc. who lived and worked in an improvised institute for almost three years. 

 

Towards the end, the director also highlighted the “DAU” project as a kind of quantum theory of reality. 

 

“The future and the present exist simultaneously,” were the words with which Khrzhanovskiy concluded the Masterclass. 

 

Thus, this unusual project, just like his first film, examines questions about ethics and ideology, good and evil, art and history, the individual and the state, reality and fiction, and inevitably – the past and the future