Authors

Discussion

When Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s experimental project Dau was presented in Paris in January 2019 everything about it looked suspicious: its mind-blowing budget, its controversial engagement with Soviet history, the ethics of exposing participants to physical and psychological violence, and even the genre of the event itself. Yet despite a shared sense of bewilderment, there were two distinct trends in the critical reception of Dau. The Russian critics mostly agreed that the experiment was phenomenal: balancing between observational documentary and feature film saga, the project involved non-professional actors who spent months living on the set of a Soviet institute constructed outside of Kharkiv. To a foreign spectator, building a functioning replica of a Soviet institute for the sake of blurring the boundary between fiction and reality was a puzzling enterprise. Looking at the production history of Dau and the spectatorship aspect of its presentation, this paper asks why the project resonated more strongly with the post-Soviet audiences. The paper examines how Dau orchestrates a unique spectatorial experience by challenging the boundaries of film as a medium and fully engaging the spectator in a simulation of a Soviet reality. As the paper suggests, Dau offered the post-Soviet audiences what post-Soviet nostalgic contexts have struggled to deliver – a possibility to build one’s own narrative through an affective engagement with the past.