Guest from the Future

Guest from the Future (Гостья из будущего, 1984) — a Soviet science-fiction miniseries by Pavel Arsenov, available to watch online on iFILM. Five episodes based on the Alice stories by Kir Bulychev, starring Natalya Guseva and Aleksei Fomkin.

Sixth-grader Kolya Gerasimov heads down to a building basement for a carton of kefir and finds a working time machine. In 21st-century Moscow he witnesses two criminals from Saturn stealing a mielophone — a device that reads minds — and brings it back to his own era. Both the pirates and Alisa Seleznyova, a girl from the future who needs to recover it, follow him back to 1984. She knows the school; she has no idea what he looks like.

For a generation of Soviet children, Guseva's Alisa became the image of a future worth wanting. Arsenov shot the contemporary Moscow scenes with a documentary quiet that makes the science fiction feel grounded rather than invented. The series holds up today not because of the robots and pirates but because it has real stakes and characters who feel like people. Stream Guest from the Future online on iFILM.