Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky is defending his upcoming film DAU against attacks by the government of Ukraine that it represents Russian propaganda and should not be screened at the Venice Film Festival next month.

Khrzhanovsky took to Facebook on Thursday to post a point-by-point rebuttal of the criticism of his film and claims linking him, the film’s financiers, and DAU actor Teodor Currentzis to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

“DAU is not a Russian film and does not represent Russia at the Venice Film Festival,” Khrzhanovsky writes, noting that he is “not a citizen of the Russian Federation” having renounced his Russian citizenship “in protest against the state policy of the Russian Federation and its war against Ukraine.”

His film, Khrzhanovsky said, “is not an instrument of Russian state cultural policy. It is an artistic statement about the nature of totalitarian evil.”

The 3-hour DAU film is the latest in a series of movies, art installations and video projects created by Khrzhanovsky using material filmed over three years from 2008 to 2011 on a closed set in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Earlier this week, the Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture, and the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy issued a joint statement criticizing the Venice festival for including DAU in its line-up.

“At the time when Russia is continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine, systematically destroying cities, cultural heritage and national identity,” the statement reads, “offering one of the world’s most prestigious cultural platforms to a project linked to the Russian state and its networks of influence sends a deeply worrying signal.”

The statement goes on to list the film’s alleged connections to Putin’s Russia, including Khrzhanovsky’s citizenship, and that of DAU lead actor Teodor Currentzis, and its connection to Sergei Adoniev, a Russian business man who has been sanctioned by Ukraine and the U.S.

Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera took to Instagram on Wednesday to clap back at those allegations and to defend his decision to include DAU at this year’s festival. In his post, Barbera describes Khrzhanovsky as “a Russian dissident who ended up on the regime’s blacklist as a terrorist and enemy of the state — a director who, from the very beginning, has taken a stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine”. He called the attacks on DAU an “inexplicable smear campaign against a film that its accusers have evidently not even seen yet.”

The DAU project, initially conceived as a biopic of the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet scientist Lev Landau (nicknamed Dau), became a massive immersive installation. Hundreds of cast members, actors and non-actors, lived on the closed set, in costume and in character, isolated from the outside world during filming. From the hundreds of hours of footage shot, Khrzhanovsky has produced several feature films. DAU. Natasha, screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, winning a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution for cinematographer Jürgen Jürges.

In his Facebook post, Khrzhanovsky refutes or qualifies the various accusations made against him and his film. Adoniev, he says, was a financier of the broader artistic 𝘋𝘈𝘜 project but “his financing ended completely in 2019 and he has had no financial relationship with the project since then. He did not finance the completion of the film selected for the competition of the Venice Film Festival.” Adoniev’s involvement, the director adds, was prior to his being sanctioned by the U.S. or Ukraine government.

The filming of the DAU project in Ukraine, writes Khrzhanovsky, took place before the Russian invasion of the country. His own position on Russia’s war against Ukraine “has been and remains unequivocal,” he writes. “I publicly supported Ukraine long before the full-scale invasion. Following the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, I signed an open letter by Russian filmmakers in support of Ukraine.”

A stickier point is DAU lead actor Theodor Currentzis. A well-known Greek conductor, Currentzis took on Russian citizenship in 2014. Currentzis has never publicly supported Russia’s war against Ukraine, but he has not publicly condemned it either.

“However one may judge his decision not to make such statements [against the war], judging a person on the basis of the citizenship they hold — and, even more so, using citizenship acquired years after most of the filming as evidence of the film’s current connection to the Russian state — is not justified,” writes Khrzhanovsky.

Given what he characterized as his long and enduring support for Ukraine, Khrzhanovsky said the attempt to frame him and his film as supporting the Russian state or its war against Ukraine was “especially painful for me.” He said he understood the need, “during wartime, to scrutinize the sources of financing of cultural projects, political connections, and possible instruments of Russian influence. [But] that is precisely why standards of factual accuracy must be particularly high.”

His movie, he said, “should not be prematurely judged on the basis of false associations, distorted chronology, or assumptions that contradict the documented history of the project. I have been and remain opposed to Russia’s war against Ukraine and to the political system that made this war possible.
Opposing totalitarianism also means defending factual truth.”

DAU will screen in competition at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, which runs Sept. 2-12.

The Paw Patrol litter is gonna need a scientist dogs. Maybe a poodle — they’re smart.

Colossal Biosciences, a de-extinction company trying to bring back the Woolly Mammoth, has enlisted the beloved pups in its efforts to save endangered species. Paramount, Spin Master and Colossal have teamed to “teach children that real animals don’t always have the Paw Patrol to rescue them. The group playing God even got Godzilla: King of the Monsters writer/director Michael Dougherty — and the dude who voices firedog Marshall (Carter Young) — to put together a call-to-action video for the little tablet-wielders.

The campaign teaches the kiddos that mayors in purple tails and top hats are not always the big bads to the animal kingdom. Usually it’s disease; often it’s us.

“The next generation of protectors, that’s us. Together, we can become a real-life Paw Patrol for our planet,” the campaign tells them.

Yes, it’s a real Mission PAW situation. Watch the video:

Thus far, Colossal has de-extincted Red Wolves, the most endangered species of wolf with only 14 left in the wild — the company used the same tech that was deployed to bring back Dire Wolves. The nerds at Colossal have also used “AI-enabled bioacoustic sensors” to decode their howls, the company says.

Colossal is very tech-forward, and is presently “working with indigenous tribes and other partners on more than 25 AI & biotechnology-enabled conservation projects” aimed at saving rhinos and amphibians as well.

If this all sounds familiar, well, it’s basically the plot of Jurassic Park. And Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie is… also basically the plot of Jurassic Park — just, you know, for preschoolers.

“After their ship gets caught in a mysterious storm, the Paw Patrol pups crash land on an uncharted tropical island filled with dinosaurs. They meet Rex, a pup who has been stranded on the island for years and has become an expert in all things dino-related,” the Dino Movie logline reads. “When the Paw Patrol’s archrival, Mayor Humdinger, begins recklessly mining in hopes of exploiting the island for its natural resources, he inadvertently causes a huge, dormant volcano to erupt.”

The pups are soon “thrown into a series of high-stakes, dino-sized rescues bigger than anything they’ve done before,” it continues, “as they must stop Humdinger before everything on the island goes extinct.

“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed Republican leaders who have refused to hold the Trump family to the same standard they held Hunter Biden for years, calling it “pure corruption.”

MS NOW co-anchor Willie Geist kicked off the Thursday morning segment with a highlight reel of certain elected officials expressing public outrage over alleged corruption within the Biden family and then refusing in the present day to discuss the business deals that the Trump family has struck since President Trump retook office last year. After the montage concluded, Geist torched Republicans for their hypocritical “false outrage.”

“That captures this political era, does it not?” he observed. “Going after Hunter Biden for something that — on the spectrum of what’s happened now in the first year-and-a-half of the second Trump term in terms of self-dealing, self-enrichment, what the sons have been able to do and how they’ve been able to profit — [is] just completely different in comparison to what Hunter Biden did.”

“I had people that were in the MAGA-adjacent media, MAGA-adjacent friends, that melted down for years over whether Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two and talked business on Air Force Two,” Scarborough said, echoing Geist’s sentiments. “These sort of things are quaint compared to, again, the defense contracts, the mining deals [that Trump’s sons have struck].”

“They’ve twisted and contorted foreign policy,” he added of Trump’s family. “With the sons and with Donald Trump and with the money that they’re making right now, again, we’re talking billions and billions of dollars straight into their pockets, it’s pure corruption. And it is actually impacting foreign policy.”

Like Geist, Scarborough was quick to criticize Republican leaders who have continued to say “absolutely nothing” about the Trump family’s business dealings over the last year-and-a-half.

“I’d rather see what the voters think about it in the fall, because corruption does matter at the end of the day,” he said. “Republicans aren’t going to say anything about it? Okay. I think their voters may, and that will be bad news for them.”

The “Morning Joe” host went on to lament the current state of the discourse surrounding the Trump family. 

“Everybody is so numb to the fact that Donald Trump is bringing in people to the White House, talking up their products, then you find out he’s invested in their companies,” Scarborough observed. “These same Republicans who were melting down over Hunter Biden possibly bringing a business associate on Air Force Two, suddenly it doesn’t matter? ‘I’m not going to talk about this.’ Of course, you’re not going to talk about it!”

“You’d have to admit they’re fleecing America,” he continued, remarking of the Trump family, “They’re fleecing our allies. They’re fleecing anybody. They’re open to the highest bidder.”