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

Bonus Materials

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