DAU. Degeneration

The institute that this film is about existed twice. Once as the top-secret Institute for Physical Problems as part of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which was in operation from 1938 to 1968, and a second time as the largest film set in Europe, which was destroyed at the end of the project. The DAU Institute in Kharkiv was an experiment designed by director Ilya Khrzhanovskiy in which leading mathematicians, artists, philosophers and mystics lived and worked between 2009 and 2011. Among other things, they explored the foundations and limits of intellectual understanding and human action, working towards the creation of a “new human being” and beyond, to the bloody end. DAU. Degeneratsia shows the institute in its cruel final phase. On his last legs, the protagonist DAU, a theoretical physicist like his role model Lev Landau, is obliged to look on as upheavals bring forth a steady stream of new institute directors. Vodka and sperm are flowing freely among both service and research staff. Meanwhile, the secret police is assisting in the rise of a nationalistic, reactionary squad of sporty young men who are ready to clean up the “pigsty”. (Berlinale)