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 student carrying a violin case (Leo 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.

directed by: Georgiy Daneliya
starring: Stanislav Lyubshin, Leo Gabriadze, Evgeniy Leonov, Yuriy Yakovlev
1986 / 132 min / 1.37:1 / Russian DTS-HD MA 2.0

Additional info:

• Region A Blu-ray
• New restoration from the original camera negative and sound elements by Mosfilm
• New hour-long video interview with lead actor Leo Gabriadze about the making of KIN-DZA-DZA! and the contributions of his father, co-writer Rezo Gabriadze, moderated by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile
• New video interview about KIN-DZA-DZA! and the rich history of Soviet science-fiction cinema with comics artist (Swamp Thing), film historian and author Stephen R. Bissette, moderated by Dennis Bartok
• New commentary track by film critic Walter Chaw (Film Freak Central)
• New written essay by film historian Justin Humphreys (George Pal: Man Of Tomorrow)
• "Got a Match? On Vodka and Vinegar at the End of History"- New video essay by journalist and physical media expert Ryan Verrill (The Disc Connected) and film professor Dr. Will Dodson
• Blu-ray authoring by David Mackenzie of Fidelity In Motion
• New art by Lucas Peverill and Beth Morris
• English subtitles