What is Dau? Well, Dau is a movie. Or ten movies. Or perhaps twelve. I wish I had all the answers – the production company, Phenomen Films, is notoriously tight-lipped – but despite cameras rolling on this mega-production back in 2006, with the shoot lasting almost a full six goddamn years, there’s been very little press coverage because of just how secretive and quite frankly dumbfounding the whole affair is. Imagine yourself in an average modern production office on the outskirts of Kharkov, a Ukrainian town of about a million and a half. Now imagine being re-dressed and entirely remade whether you’re an actor or an assistant, from hair to socks to underwear, in Soviet garb circa 1952 before being led to the connected set. Only it isn’t a “set” so much as it is a fully functioning city housed within an enormous brick building; a built-to-scale section of Stalin’s Moscow spanning 130,000 square feet.Every lodging populated, every “extra” a working part of a time-displaced totalitarian society, exchanging period-appropriate Rubles for tins of Soviet food marked with 1950s expiration dates and living in fear of local security. Fully-stocked refrigerators, or as stocked as they would have been at the time. Working toilets with pipes measured to the exact dimensions of the era so as to make a specific flushing sound. Grandiose music blaring from mounted loudspeakers to set you on edge, if the gargantuan statues of arms and sickles don’t do the trick, and a ban on modern technology and words like “set” and “lighting,” or any anachronism that didn’t line up with the given decade being filmed, like if Westworld had a wing for the misery of post-war Russia.
― Simon H., Wednesday, 11 July 2018 15:54 (five years ago) link