The Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky won the Silver Lion for best director for the visually stunning DAU, a biopic of the Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist Lev Landau, who was pressured into working on the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons programme.

Axar.az reports, citing The Guardian, that the inclusion of Khrzhanovsky’s film in the Venice lineup was criticised by the Ukrainian government in the run-up to the festival, over its lead actor Teodor Currentzis’s refusal to condemn the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and for having received funding from a Russian businessman who was later sanctioned by the US and Ukraine.

DAU was filmed in Kharkiv between 2008 and 2011, before the start of the conflict. At a press conference on the Lido, Khrzhanovsky said: “The only thing I can wish for is peace and success for the Ukrainian government to succeed in the best possible way, to save the country and to win this war.”