Kin-dza-dza!

Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky circa SOLARIS directing Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and youll 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, theyre 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 Jodorowskys 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 youre living under or what planet youre living on.