Kin-dza-dza!: From Moscow to the Karakum

Foreman Uncle Vova is sent out for bread. On Kalinin Prospekt, today's New Arbat Avenue, a barefoot stranger in a tattered coat asks passersby for the number of their planet, then shows Vova and a young violinist a "device for moving in space". Vova presses a button anyway. The scene was shot on the avenue: the bread shop he was heading for stood at house 28, and the stranger waited near number 26. The street was named Kalinin Prospekt from 1968 to 1994.

Visitor guidance: New Arbat is a busy eight-lane avenue; houses 26 and 28 are on the same stretch.

Click, and the Moscow street is gone: Vova and the Violinist stand alone in sand under a blazing sun. They assume they are in the Karakum and set off towards Ashgabat. In fact they are on the planet Pluke, whose rusty, ruined cities lie buried in sand, so you cannot tell them from the desert. The Pluke scenes were filmed in the Turkmen Karakum, near Nebit-Dag, now called Balkanabat, about 450 km west of Ashgabat.

Location precision: The film never names a spot; the pin marks Balkanabat (formerly Nebit-Dag), the town near which the Pluke desert scenes were shot.

The heroes ride a trolley through a tunnel, an episode shot in the Moscow Metro at Polyanka station, which was still under construction. The station opened in 1986, the same year the film came out. Today Polyanka is an ordinary working station on the Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya Line, in Moscow's Yakimanka District, with a large sculpture of a couple with a child at the end of the hall.

Visitor guidance: Polyanka is an open Metro station on the Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya Line.

On Pluke, Patsak performers may sing only inside an iron cage. When Bi and Uef end up arrested and jailed, a fine has to be paid to free the performers, and Vova and the Violinist take to the cage themselves; one of their numbers is "Strangers in the Night", sung as "Strangers in the ku". The cage scene was filmed under the revolving stage of the Soviet Army Theatre in Moscow, a huge building on Suvorov Square whose stage could hold real tanks, cavalry and big models of ships.

Visitor guidance: The theatre is a working venue on Suvorov Square; check its programme for performances.

Mr. P-Zh is the nominal ruler of Pluke. Having taken a policeman hostage, the two Earthmen walk through P-Zh's chambers on their way to free Bi and Uef from the prison. Neither palace nor prison exists: both were built in Pavilion 4 of the Mosfilm studio in Moscow. Mosfilm, founded in 1924, is one of the largest film studios in Europe and made most of the widely acclaimed Soviet-era films.

Location precision: Pluke is invented; the palace and prison were studio sets, and the pin marks the Mosfilm studio where they were built.