Ilya Khrzhanovsky

Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky (; born 11 August 1975) is a Russian-born film director, screenwriter, film producer and member of the European Film Academy.
His father Andrei Khrzhanovsky (b. 1939) is one of the top Russian animation directors, and his mother Mariya Neyman, a philologist and script editor. He is the grandson of artist and actor (1905—1987).

In 2006 Khrzhanovsky launched the DAU project and has since been producing and directing films and other products for it.

Since 2007 Khrzhanovsky has permanently resided outside of Russia, in Germany, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. In March 2014 he signed the open letter "We are with you!" issued by the Russian Film Union KinoSoyuz in support of Ukraine, and since February 2022 has consistently opposed
the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From 2020 to 2023 Khrzhanovsky worked as the Artistic Director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. As of March 2022, he was in Israel. In March 2024, The Russian Ministry of Justice added Ilya Khrzhanovsky to the list of foreign agents in Russia. In September 2024, Khrzhanovsky refused Russian citizenship.

Early career

Khrzhanovsky attended the Bonn Academy of Fine Arts (1992–1993) and the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (1998) (VGIK). His directorial debut was the stage production of ''What I Feel'' () at the Kukart Festival at Peterhof in 1997.

In 1998 he co-directed together with Artyom Mikhalkov the short movie ''Stop'' ().

Between 1998 and 2002, Khrzhanovsky worked as a director and producer in commercial advertising and created ''The List of Lovers of the RF'' for the Russian TNT Channel, a series directed by leading Russian movie directors. In 2003, the project was included in the Berlin International Film Festival programme, as well as other notable Russian and international film festivals.

''Phenomen'' Companies and ''Paper Soldier''

In 2005 Khrzhanovsky co-founded Phenomen Films production company. Phenomen Films developed and produced the critically acclaimed film Paper Soldier (2008) by Aleksei German Jr, that won among others the Silver Lion for Best Direction and Golden Osella for Best Cinematography at the 65th Venice Film Festival. It was also nominated for European Cinematographer at the European Film Awards.

In 2009 Khrzhanovsky co-founded Phenomen-Ukraine and in 2010 co-founded Phenomen Berlin Filmproduktions GmbH (Germany).

''4''

Khrzhanovsky directed the film '' 4'' earning him several awards including a Golden Cactus and Tiger Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, Best Director Prize at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Grand Jury Prize as Best New Director at the Seattle International Film Festival, Best Film and Best Camera Prize at the Transylvania International Film Festival, Best Director Prize at the Athens International Film Festival and a nomination for the Fassbinder Award. It was included in official programs of more than 50 international film festivals including Venice Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Los Angeles Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival. ''4'' was distributed in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium, the United States, and also Scandinavian and South Asian countries.

DAU project

DAU is a multidisciplinary project at the intersection of cinema, art and anthropology that premiered in Paris in 2019. DAU was initially conceived as a full-length feature film about the life of a genius in troubled times loosely based on the biography of the Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau (nicknamed Dau).

However the filming process transformed into a 'total performance' and 'total installation' rather than a conventional film shoot.

In 2008 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the largest shooting location in Europe spanning 12,000m², named the institute, was constructed as part of the project. How the location functioned and was used in the filming has suggested parallels between DAU and such projects as Synecdoche, New York and The Truman Show.

The auditions for DAU involved 392,000 non-actors. Around 200-300 non-actors lived on-set at any one time and around 400 were filmed including scientists, musicians, artists, composers, religious leaders and philosophers, as well as waitresses, cleaners, secret police officers, cooks and hairdressers. 40,000 costume units were produced and purchased during shooting.

The architecture, costumes, objects and food created a phantasmagorical reconstruction of the Soviet era of the 1930s to 1960s. The unscripted process was filmed intermittently from October 2009 to November 2011 during which no modern clothes including underwear, no modern sanitary products or any other modern objects or vocabulary were allowed on the set and period costume, make-up and hairstyles were required from everyone including the crew, regardless if shooting was occurring.
With no script or takes, the characters acted and reacted in the meticulously designed circumstances, sometimes staying on set for months.
Everyone, with the exception of Dau (conductor Teodor Currentzis), his wife (actress Radmila Schegoleva), their son (as young adult - musician Nikolai Voronov), and Krupitsa, director of the institute from 1938 to 1953 (theater director Anatoly Vasiliev), lived in the Institute under their own names. Their real biographies were adapted to Soviet realities.
Among the employees and the guests of the Institute there were theoretical physicists, neuroscientists and biologists, including Profs. Nobel laureate David Gross, Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau, Nikita Nekrasov, Dmitry Kaledin, Andrey Losev, Samson Shatashvili, Carlo Rovelli, Eric Verlinde, James H. Fallon, and media and performance contemporary artists including Marina Abramović, Carsten Höller, Boris Mikhailov, Peter Sellars, Romeo Castellucci, Alexei Blinov, Rav Steinsaltz, Peruvian shaman Guillermo Arévalo and others.

The process resulted in 700 hours of 35mm film. 13 films of various genres edited from this material were part of the premiere in Paris in 2019. The movies were voiced by Gérard Depardieu, Willem Dafoe, Isabelle Adjani, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Charlotte Rampling, Hanna Schygulla, Vicky Krieps, Jella Haase, Lars Eidinger, Blixa Bargeld, Denis Lavant, and others. The 'mother film' that focused on Dau's life story with the Institute being just one of the storylines yet to be released.

The genre of the project is defined by critics as 'sprawling immersive-theater/film/installation', 'totalitarian reality show', 'not just film or theatre but also of site-specific improvisational performances' and also as 'the entire culture of the 1930s-1960s'.

Apart from movie products, the project has additionally manifested in other formats such as books, conferences and complex installations.

Books

Transcribed conversations of characters recorded during the shooting as well as off shooting were available at the Paris premiere.

''Thames & Hudson'' prepared the publication of ''DAU Document'', collecting stills from all footage, on-set photographs shot with Soviet-era Leica cameras (selected from 1.5 million images) and results of the scientific experiments carried out in the film. Essays exploring themes such as the nature of community, power, love, altered states of consciousness and violence intersperse the visual chronological account. The final section catalogues the 80,000 items of period clothing and props as well as the characters who populate the project, where frames from all the footage are presented in chronological order.

In 2018 Comme des Garçons collaborated with DAU project to release an album of photographs as part of their annual initiative of publishing the work of artists and photographers.

In 2018 ''The DAU Rooms at Le Châtelet'' special edition was released as 'a gift to the city of Paris' containing the works of Bakst, Larionov and Natalia Goncharova next to the fragments of DAU installations with forewords by the Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo, artistic director of the Châtelet Theater Ruth Mackenzie and others.

Conferences

In 2017 a series of conferences started in London to explore the wide range of cultural, social, and political issues raised in DAU. The participants included historians, scientists, political figures, diplomats, such as professors Teodor Shanin, Alexander Etkind, Robert Service, James Fallon, the first president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk, the first state secretary of Russia Gennady Burbulis, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Belarus Stanislav Shushkevich, UK Ambassador to USSR Sir Roderick Braithwaite, West German Ambassador to USSR Andreas Meyer-Landrut, the former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, Sir Michael David Jackson, former publicity director at Sinn Féin Danny Morrison and others. The conferences took place in London School of Economics and Political Science, House of Commons, House of Lords, London Royal Society.
They continued in Paris at the premiere of the project in 2019.
In 2019, at premiere of the project in Paris, conferences continued with the participation of writer Jonathan Littell, futurologist Real Miller, professor of physics and string theorist Nikita Nekrasov, writer and social critic Evgeny Morozov, photographer Reza Deghati

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