School (Season 1)

School (Shkola, 2010) is a Russian drama from director Valeria Gai Germanika that you can watch online on iFILM. Class 9-A was the model group of the school as long as its tough, respected teacher Nosov stood at the front. The moment he falls ill, that reputation collapses overnight.

Discipline frays, and not a single teacher wants to take on the class that went from best to most impossible. Nosov's own granddaughter, Anya, turns out to be one of the hardest teenagers in the building, while new arrival Ilya Epifanov keeps engineering situations that drag out sides of his classmates — and the staff — nobody wanted exposed. Shot on shaky handheld cameras, almost without music, with kids who talk like real kids, the show set off a public scandal and even parliamentary debate when Channel One aired it in 2010.

Germanika, working with Natalia Meshchaninova and Ruslan Malikov, made no tidy lesson about adolescence — instead a cold, near-documentary look at school with the gloss stripped off. It still rubs plenty of viewers the wrong way, and that's exactly its power. One of the most talked-about Russian series of its decade. Stream School (2010) online on iFILM.