I Am

I Am (Я, 2009) is a Russian drama by Igor Voloshin you can watch online on iFILM. As the Soviet era winds down, a young man checks into a district psychiatric ward to dodge the draft. The scheme half works: he walks out with his exemption papers, but the months of forced treatment never really let him go.

Across three stages of the hero's life — childhood, adolescence, youth — Voloshin builds a portrait of an entire generation raised on the collapse of a country. Artur Smolyaninov, Oksana Akinshina, Aleksey Gorbunov and Anna Mikhalkova play people the era ground down before they could figure out who they were. It's raw, physical filmmaking, rated 18+.

Voloshin chases a feeling rather than a plot — a jagged memory where the army, Chechnya and the teenage streets of the nineties blur into one long blackout. Not an easy night in, but for fans of auteur Russian cinema it lands hard. Stream I Am online on iFILM.