This monumental drama, shot in a replica of Moscow’s real-life Institute of Physical Problems, is an arthouse freakout
Earlier this year at the
Berlin film festival, I saw the brutal and bizarre DAU. Natasha. It is one of 14 feature films that have come out of the extraordinary multimedia DAU project devised by
Russian film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, who over the past decade has built a detailed full-scale replica of the
Moscow building housing the real-life Institute of Physical Problems, an experimental psychology unit presided over in the 60s by the free-thinking Soviet scientist Lev Landau (nicknamed “Dau”), and filled it with actors improvising the imagined lives of its scientist researchers on a 24/7 basis. He recorded the results in films, video art and photo collections.
Related: Inside Dau, the 'Stalinist Truman Show': 'I had absolute freedom – until the KGB grabbed me'