To say that the movie «Kin-dza-dza!» is legendary is to say nothing about it at all. People still argue about it, still watch it, and still try to understand what it was—great foresight on the part of a great director, or a desire to make a dystopian movie. And perhaps today it is we who know by the distinguishing signs how many times a patsak must squat before a chatlanin, we have a bell in our nose, and the notorious yellow trousers are the very limit of our dreams. As soon as the movie was released, it was immediately broken down into quotations, and it is impossible to know where, across the vastness of our country, one might find a person who does not know what a gravitsapa or a KC is, or how to pronounce the word «Ku». The movie’s director, Georgy Daneliya, managed to bring together truly great actors in this movie—Lyubshin, Leonov, Yakovlev—who are legends in their own right, dress them in rags, place them in the midst of a lifeless desert, and still make the viewer laugh and think at the same time, something that often seems impossible for another director to achieve. It is impossible to understand the secret of how such movies, which live on for decades, come into being. There is no single clear recipe for genius, because if one breaks the movie down into plot lines and little fragments, it seems utterly unattractive: there are no thrilling fights, colorful battle scenes, or fatal beauty—only a colorless desert and means of transport resembling rusty metal barrels, while the movie’s budget would have been enough only for the opening credits of some «Star Wars». There is no spectacle, and yet it is impossible to tear oneself away from the screen.
