13 Facts About Ilya Khrzhanovsky

Ilya Andreyevich Khrzhanovsky is a Russian-born film director, screenwriter, film producer and member of the European Film Academy.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky is the grandson of artist and actor Yury Khrzhanovsky.

In 2006 Khrzhanovsky launched the DAU project and has since been producing and directing films and other products for it.

Since 2007 Ilya Khrzhanovsky has permanently resided outside of Russia, in Germany, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

From 2020 to 2023 Ilya Khrzhanovsky worked as the Artistic Director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky attended the Bonn Academy of Fine Arts and the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography.

Between 1998 and 2002, Ilya Khrzhanovsky worked as a director and producer in commercial advertising and created The List of Lovers of the RF for the Russian TNT Channel, a series directed by leading Russian movie directors.

In 2009 Ilya Khrzhanovsky co-founded Phenomen-Ukraine and in 2010 co-founded Phenomen Berlin Filmproduktions GmbH.

In 2019 Ilya Khrzhanovsky accepted the offer made by the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center to take up the position of the project's Artistic Director.

On 24 February 2022 Ilya Khrzhanovsky became one of the first signatories of the appeal of directors, writers, journalists, artists, scientists and publishers demanding to 'end this war'.

Also on 24 February 2022 Ilya Khrzhanovsky joined the appeal of leading Russian cinematographers issued by The Union of Cinematographers and Professional Cinematographic Organisations and Associations of Russia.

Since the Paris premiere of DAU in 2019 Ilya Khrzhanovsky's methods have been criticized, in particular from the point of view of engaging and working with non-actors.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky stressed that he stayed fully committed to the frame of historical narrative that had been elaborated by scholars and pointed at the difference between methods he had used when working on the DAU arthouse project and those appropriate for dealing with the memory of Babyn Yar tragedy.