The director of a controversial new Russian film said “everyone pays for their choice” when asked about his protagonist’s refusal to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine. In director Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s film DAU, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, star Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis plays the eponymous protagonist, Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Lev Landau. Ahead of the festival, the film’s inclusion in the program was heavily criticized by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, partly due to the fact that Athens-born Currentzis continues to live and work in Russia and has never publicly condemned Putin’s war. “This is his choice,” Khrzhanovsky said at a press conference on the Lido. “But I think everyone pays for their choice, their life, their destiny,” added the filmmaker, who renounced Russian citizenship due to the full-scale invasion and lives in exile in Germany. He referred to his film in which Currentzis Landau’s character is forced to work on developing a nuclear bomb and he eventually reluctantly agrees. “As you can see in the film, the main character also makes different choices and pays for his choices.” Currentzis did not attend the Venice premiere due to a “last-minute emergency,” but Chrzanowski said he is still in touch with his leading man and that he is “one of the greatest conductors of our time.” Asked about his own position on the state of war in Ukraine, Khrzhanovsky said: “The only thing I can wish for is peace and success, so that the Ukrainian government succeeds in the best possible way, saves the country and wins this war.” The DAU was a highly controversial project long before Russian tanks began appearing on Ukrainian soil. Originally pitched to producers in 2006 as a conventional biopic and filmed between 2008 and 2011 in Kharkov, Ukraine, the film evolved into a mammoth piece of experimental performance art with 400 leads and approximately 10,000 extras. Some critics compared it to “Stalin’s Truman Show.” Allegations of behind-the-scenes misconduct dogged the project for more than a decade, with reports that on-set “KGB officers” played by real-life former KGB officers were allowed to supervise and discipline the rest of the cast. Author Mikhail Idov, who was one of the few journalists allowed to spend time on the set, described Khrzhanovsky as “upset” in a 2011 GQ article. In Venice, Khrzhanovsky said he left 700 hours of footage in Kharkov untouched between the end of filming and 2023 in order to concentrate on the ramifications of the DAU art project. Experimental films of DAU. Natasha and DAU. “Degeneration” premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, but Khrzhanovsky called the three-hour feature, which premiered in Venice, a “mother film.” Post navigation Now FOUR Juror Lindsay Clancy makes unusual admission after deliberations affected her vote: ‘I thought she was guilty…maybe I still do’ “I was at the 2026 National Television Awards and I almost cried.”