[30][31] Around 200-300 non-actors lived on-set at any one time [32] and around 400 were filmed including scientists, musicians, artists, composers, religious leaders and philosophers, as well as waitresses, cleaners, secret police officers, cooks and hairdressers.

Nobel laureate David Gross, Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau, Nikita Nekrasov, Dmitry Kaledin, Andrey Losev, Samson Shatashvili, Carlo Rovelli, Eric Verlinde, James H. Fallon, and media and performance contemporary artists including Marina Abramović, Carsten Höller, Boris Mikhailov, Peter Sellars, Romeo Castellucci, Alexei Blinov, Rav Steinsaltz, Peruvian shaman Guillermo Arévalo and others.

[67][68][69] The genre of the project is defined by critics as 'sprawling immersive-theater/film/installation',[70] 'totalitarian reality show',[71] 'not just film or theatre but also of site-specific improvisational performances' [72] and also as 'the entire culture of the 1930s-1960s'.

[74][75] Thames & Hudson prepared the publication of DAU Document,[76] collecting stills from all footage, on-set photographs shot with Soviet-era Leica cameras (selected from 1.5 million images) and results of the scientific experiments carried out in the film.

Essays exploring themes such as the nature of community, power, love, altered states of consciousness and violence intersperse the visual chronological account.

The final section catalogues the 80,000 items of period clothing and props as well as the characters who populate the project, where frames from all the footage are presented in chronological order.

[81][82] The participants included historians, scientists, political figures, diplomats, such as professors Teodor Shanin, Alexander Etkind, Robert Service, James Fallon, the first president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk, the first state secretary of Russia Gennady Burbulis, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Belarus Stanislav Shushkevich, UK Ambassador to USSR Sir Roderick Braithwaite, West German Ambassador to USSR Andreas Meyer-Landrut, the former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, Sir Michael David Jackson, former publicity director at Sinn Féin Danny Morrison and others.

An installation supposed to take place at the planned Berlin premiere of the project in 2018 was cancelled by the city authorities referring to safety and technical issues.

[100] Round-the-clock screenings of the films were accompanied by performances, concerts, installations and conferences; visitors could also visit a canteen, bars, a Soviet shop and have one-to-one sessions with 'active listeners'.

[101][102][103] Khrzhanovsky claims the movies are just trailers of what he calls the main product Dau.Digital,[104] an interactive online platform presenting all 700 hours of rushes where a user is navigated by the tags and can structure their own narrative.

[107] In 2019 Khrzhanovsky accepted the offer made by the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC) to take up the position of the project's Artistic Director.

[110] In September 2020 on the 79th anniversary of the tragedy in Babyn Yar in the presence of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, BYHMC unveiled an audiovisual outdoor memorial installation.

[118][119] In July 2021 Ilya Khrzhanovsky with the participation of Marina Abramović presented the final concept of BYHMC and the plans for its development at the All Ukrainian forum 'Ukraine 30 - Humanitarian Policy' with Volodymir Zelenskyy announcing the project's timeframe.

[120] On 6 October 2021 in the presence of the presidents of Ukraine, Israel and Germany The Crystal Wall of Crying interactive installation by Marina Abramović, commissioned by BYHMC, was unveiled.

[134] In September 2023 Khrzhanovsky made a public statement [135] that he had left the post of artistic director of the Memorial Center, telling that "the war has changed and will continue to change many things in the perception and building of the culture of memory in Ukraine"; "in the current context the stage of his activities is completed" and he "does not consider it right to work in Ukraine, not physically living there or sharing all the troubles and dangers with Ukrainian society".

[136] The statement was commented on social media by Natan Shcharansky, the head of the supervisory board of BYHMC Charitable Foundation, is a former political prisoner in the Soviet Union, human rights activist, who in particular mentioned "it is difficult to overestimate your contribution to this most important project for the Jewish people and for Ukraine" [137] In March 2014 Khrzhanovsky signed the open letter "We are with you!"

[152][153] The Head of Scientific Council Karel Berkhoff and the CEO Yana Bariniva left the project as a mark of protest against the approach reflected in the concept.

[154][155] In response, the Memorial Center issued a statement saying: 'All accusations addressed now to Ilya Khrzanovsky are made based on emotions and subjective thoughts built upon speculations and assumptions' and called the media and public to 'be objective and balanced'.

He also 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.