Dau. Katya Tanya [2021] Jun 2026

Within the vast, shadowy architecture of the DAU project—a sprawling, decade-spanning cinematic universe built from 700 hours of footage in a full-scale reconstruction of a Stalin-era research institute— DAU. Katya Tanya emerges not as a grand spectacle, but as a quiet, intimate whisper of melancholy. For those uninitiated, DAU is the brainchild of visionary and notoriously polarizing Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky. What began as a planned biopic of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau evolved into a multidisciplinary, "immersive social experiment." From 2009 to 2011, a cast of hundreds of non-professional actors lived, worked, and slept in a painstakingly recreated Soviet scientific facility in Kharkiv, Ukraine, their real lives and scripted interactions captured by a hidden network of cameras.

Oertel's input is what makes "Katya Tanya" unique within the DAU universe. Her focus on intimate, character-driven storytelling provides a sharp contrast to the project's other, more sprawling and brutal films. In an in-depth interview, she discussed how her feminist perspective shaped the film's approach to themes of lesbian intimacy and state violence. Her personal experience as an actor on the set, feeling the weight of the project's immersive reality, informed her empathetic editing and directing style, ensuring Katya's story was told with nuance. DAU. Katya Tanya

DAU. Katya Tanya is one of the 14 feature films mined from this radical artistic upheaval. Co-directed by Khrzhanovsky and his long-time collaborator Jekaterina Oertel, and released online on May 15, 2020, this drama offers perhaps the most delicate, melancholic, and psychologically nuanced entry into the entire series. Shifting its gaze from the series' usual focus on sexual brutality and institutional terror, Katya Tanya instead examines the quiet erosion of the human spirit in an atmosphere of total surveillance, seen through the eyes of its two female protagonists. Within the vast, shadowy architecture of the DAU

"Preach, Katya! DAU is the lifeblood of any product or app. It tells us how many users are coming back for more every single day." What began as a planned biopic of Nobel

To understand "DAU. Katya Tanya" , one must first understand the sprawling and controversial project it belongs to. Conceived by Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy and producer Sergei Adonyev, the "DAU" project (named for the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lev Landau) began as a traditional biopic but quickly evolved into something far more radical. The project was designed as an immersive, multi-disciplinary experiment to blur the lines between film, performance, and real life, building a functioning copy of a Soviet scientific institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine, based on real models from the 1938-1968 period.

Like the DAU project itself, Katya Tanya is inseparable from the profound ethical controversies that surround its creation. The project has been heavily criticized for its treatment of its non-professional actors. Reports emerged of "horrific conditions on the set, continuous abuse from the director, and the disastrous impact the production had on the city". The immersive nature of the experiment, where actors lived their roles for years, is seen by critics as a morally dubious line between art and psychological manipulation.