Based on the book by Kora Drobantseva-Landau
"Academician Landau: what our life was like"

The plot is based on the life of the great Russian physicist of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize, Lev Landau (1908-1968).

Landau - or Dau, which is what his friends called him - was a "child prodigy"; he entered the university at the age of 13. By the age of 20-something, he had become a world-famous theoretical physicist. In the 1930's, Landau studied and worked in Denmark, Germany and Great Britain; he had the opportunity to stay in Europe, but chose to come back to the USSR. A staunch believer in Marxism, Landau openly criticized the Stalinist regime, for which, at age 32, he was sent to prison. A year later, having been freed thanks to the efforts of another Nobel Prize winner, Peter Kapitsa, he started work on a secret project for a new weapon. Physicists from all over the ex-USSR came to hear his lectures, and two of his favorite pupils, V. Ginsburg and A. Abrikosov, won the Physics Nobel Prize in 2003 for breakthroughs that go back to Landau's works.
Love, intrigues, sex, anguish, politics, Stalinist prisons, the atomic bomb, a physics course made up of problems imagined on a sofa, the Nobel prize, Denmark, Niels Bohr, the Theory of Superfluidity, poetry, foreign languages, help of friends and hatred of foes and...the hated dependence of the body on the independent spirit...
Baku, Leningrad, Berlin, London, Copenhagen, Kharkov, Moscow...
The 1940's-1950's... the golden age of Soviet science - the separate microworld of academic life, created by Stalin; a world in which Academicians don't know how much the bread costs or how to take the subway. They receive food from special distribution centers and live in huge apartments guarded by the KGB, while the vast majority of the country is virtually starving and living in communal apartments.
The life of Academician Landau: Academicians Kapitsa, Vavilov, Ginsburg, Abrikosov, Sakharov, Tamm... and Lenas, Ol

The first and perhaps the most important comment is that the future film is not a biography. This story could take place here and now, at the beginning of the 21st century. It is a story about freedom, and mostly about internal, personal freedom; about secret desires that a man permits or doesn't permit himself to realise; about how much a man can allow himself and what he has to pay for this.
And at the same time the characters of the future movie lived at a very certain time, during one of the frightening periods of Russian history, a time when the price of personal freedom and worth of a human life itself was extremely devalued by the totalitarian system of Stalin's dictatorship. A time when the most terrible and most powerful weapons in the history of humankind - the hydrogen, thermonuclear and nuclear bombs - were created. These were designed and developed by physicists - the heroes of the future movie, including the main character - Lev Landau.
This film is also about how, during the years of Soviet power in the USSR, a new genotype of a human being was formed - the Soviet man.
It is also a film about what Genius is, about where Genius ends and Human Being begins - a human being with all the desires, lusts, whims and weakness peculiar to humans. About how to live with a Genius, how to love a Genius, how to tolerate a Genius.
And, of course, it is a film about love and about the different shapes this feeling can take.

Images

Complex shots reconstructing the streets and domestic life of that era must be as real as possible, so that we could combine them with documentary newsreels of that time and "implant" the necessary characters into the newsreels by means of computer animation.
Most probably, different filming styles of that time will be used: from Dziga Vertov (when the plot talks about the 1920's and the early 1930's) through all classicist, often statuary cinematography styles of the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, to Italian neo-realist style and the advent of the French new wave.
At the same time, the psychological, "relationship" scenes, such as those of Landau and Kora, have to be filmed in such a way that the audience is not distracted by the historical period of the action and is absorbed by the psychological pattern - which means close-ups and super close-ups of the characters, possibly filmed by handheld camera, which will bestow on the shots additional authenticity.

Colour

The end of the 1920's and the beginning of the 1930's. The flourishing of the Russian avant-guard. Malevich, Kandinsky, Filonov and many others. There is a famous story about how in his youth Landau painted the walls in his apartment, as well as his furniture, in bright colours.
The acute form of constructivism and suprematism in architecture, furniture, clothes. Very clear, rich colours against the background of the grey, washed-out, poverty-stricken Soviet life will create a certain contrast.
Little by little, from the middle of the 1930's, the mud-green, brown and grey colours start to predominate. The pompous Stalinist sculpture and architecture emerges. Factories that tailor identical clothes are actively functioning, and everyone walks around in identical suits and coats, with identical haircuts, etc. The picture becomes more monochrome.
The colour in the movie appears at some times and strikes with its richness, while, at other times, the picture is almost colourless, monochrome, sometimes even black and white.

Sound

Radio was extremely popular in the 1920's - 1940's in the USSR. Sounds of the radio could be heard everywhere. Radio loudspeakers were installed in the streets. All the apartments and houses had radios, and from six in the morning the Soviet man was emerged in sounds of the state anthem, information and music. Radio, car horns, policemen's whistles, rattle of rails and bells of trams, clatter of women's heels and rumble of soldiers' boots, and, finally, street orchestras - at that time, there were very many of them and very often they stood right next to each other, playing absolutely different music. All of these will go to create the real, sometimes beautifully harmonious, and sometimes, turning into hellish cacophony, the monstrous and physiologically frightening, world of sounds of that time.
It is well known that Landau didn't like music, and that he was irritated in general by any outside sounds. This is why, when the action takes place in Landau's apartment, the phonogram will be based on macro-sounds: rustling, breathing, love-making, the whisper of sheets of paper and book pages, food digesting inside the stomach, belching, farting, the wheezing of the respiratory machine in the hospital when Landau is sick, etc.