The Grand Illusion

In honor of the Grand Illusion's 22nd anniversary as a volunteer-operated non-profit, we're screening a movie that is very much our bag: the wonderfully weird cult classic, KIN-DZA-DZA!, beautifully restored by Mosfilm and distributed by the fine folks at Deaf Crocodile. Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and you’ll come close to the existential strangeness of this delightfully loopy Soviet-era sci-fi comedy, this year celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Two average Muscovites – a plainspoken construction foreman (Stanislav Lyubshin) and a Georgian violin student (Levan Gabriadze) – encounter an odd 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.

In Russian with English subtitles.

“…possibly the most underrated science fiction film of the past 50 years.” Joel Blackledge, Little White Lies

“Bittersweet satire posing as postapocalyptic science fiction, Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-dza-dza! has as much to say about today as it does the last gasps of the Soviet Union.” Budd Wilkins, Slant