Kin-Dza-Dza!

KIN-DZA-DZA! - 1986, Mosfilm, 135 min. Dir. Georgiy Daneliya. Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and you'll come close to the existential weirdness of the wonderfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy KIN-DZA-DZA! Two average Muscovites - a plainspoken construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin) and a Georgian violin student (Levan Gabriadze) - encounter an odd homeless man on the street who asks, Tell me the number of your planet in the Tentura? In a flash, they're teleported across the universe to the planet Pluke in the Kin-Dza-Dza galaxy - a Tatooine-like desert world whose inhabitants are hilariously noncommunicative (their main words are ku for good and kyu for very bad) and where common wooden matches are tremendously valuable. A deadpan, absurdist mixture of Kurt Vonnegut, Monty Python, Samuel Beckett and Jodorowsky's never-made Dune where alien cultures are even more haphazard and WTF? than our own, the film is also a savage satire of bureaucratic idiocy and dysfunction no matter what political system you're living under - or what planet you're living on. Recently restored by Mosfilm for its first-ever U.S. release by Deaf Crocodile and Seagull Films. In Russian with English subtitles. Possibly the most underrated science fiction film of the past 50 years ... A collapsed Ferris wheel provides a home for destitute desert dwellers. Graves are marked by balloons containing the deceased's final breath. The colour of your trousers signifies social status, so they are powerful barter items... There is no convoluted plot, but instead a convoluted universe, and its incredulous victims ready to point out the farcicality therein. - Joel Blackledge, Little White Lies