Trailer Talk: Dau

As I mentioned some time ago, while I usually save trailers for the Friday roundup, there’s occasionally one that will pop up, and I just can’t ignore. This is another one of those.

Plus, there’s actually no trailer for me to put here (though I will provide a link at the end of the article), so I wouldn’t have been able to put it in my normal Friday roundup like all the other trailers.

What is Dau? That’s a good question, but one that is far more complicated that you might thing. To put it simply, it’s a project by Russian filmmaker, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, that revolves around the life of Nobel Prize winning Soviet physicist, Lev Landau. However, that doesn’t really capture exactly what the big deal around this project. So, get ready.

The “film” began development in 2006, and started shooting in 2008, with everything surrounding the project being kept secret. While it was shot in many locations, a huge chunk of it was done so on a massive set was built in Ukraine, known as “The Institute,” a living, breathing replica of Moscow, which spanned the course of a few decades, filled with over 400 people (not counting extras) who seemingly lived out the lives of their characters, completely cut off from the outside world.

Over 700 hours of footage has been shot on 35mm, and 13 feature films have been made, and that’s likely not even close to all that they’re preparing to unleash. I have no idea what to make of this, but I am anxious to see what this is. Whatever they plan on releasing is going to be available in the fall, though it likely won’t be available everywhere.

I’m not entirely sure what could inspire such madness, especially from a director who only has one other feature credit, that being the more conventionally made 2004 film, 4. But this was something that I’ve been trying to read as much about as possibly for a while, and I just had to share it once I found out about this trailer that was put up yesterday. There’s nothing that immediately comes to mind that comes close to the extreme scope and dedication to experimentation and vision of Dau.

If you want to read more about it (which I highly recommend, since I barely scratched the surface on the craziness here), there’s two articles I highly recommend. One is the first major write-up on the experiment, which is a GQ article by Michael Idov, from way back in 2011 when he got to visit the set. The other is a great deep dive by Siddhant Adlakha on Birth.Movies.Death. that delves into more details behind the film and the filmmakers, and the various question that it all raises about the nature of art and cinema and how it informs and pulls from life.

Now, as for the trailer, you can watch it on the film’s official website, dau.xxx. You can also subscribe to their mailing list for more info, which we’ll probably get more of as we get closer to autumn.