The 'DAU Cinema Project' is an immersive social and artistic experiment made over a span of ten years beginning in 2007. Russian director Illya Khrzhanovskiy replicated a top-secret Soviet research facility that ran from 1938 to 1968, led by Nobel Prize–winning scientist Lev Landau, nicknamed DAU. The carbon-copy institute, the largest in cinematic history across Europe, was populated with amateur actors, who lived their roles twenty-four hours a day and were monitored by surveillance cameras around the clock.

'DAU Cinema Project' was first intended as an installation rather than a film project. From 2009 to 2011, it yielded more than 700 hours of footage, produced into fourteen feature films, including DAU. Natasha and DAU. Degeneration. Khrzhanovskiy’s monumental recreation of a historical period ambitiously asks questions on art and history, fiction and reality, ideology and the state, and ethics in filmmaking. Since its inception, the project has long attracted attention from many notable cultural institutions in Europe where its first interdisciplinary exhibition was hosted in 2019.