Art and Fact (Season 1)

Art and Fact (Арт и Факт, 2023) is a Russian dramatic anthology you can watch online on iFILM. Four short stories, four canvases of 19th-century Russian painting, and the four artists behind them: Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Perov, Mikhail Vrubel and Viktor Borisov-Musatov.

Every episode unwinds a single painting into a story. "Morning in a Pine Forest" comes with the question of whether Shishkin ever actually painted those bears. Perov's "Troika" leads to the real fate of the boy who modeled for it. "Demon Downcast" traces the part that one picture played in Vrubel's unraveling. And "Ghosts" asks why Borisov-Musatov saw shadows where others saw only a garden. The lives inside the frame and the lives of the men who painted them braid together. Artur Vakha, Vladimir Koshevoy and Dmitry Moguchev step into the painters' shoes.

Director Oleg Gusev didn't make an art-history lecture but four compact dramas about the price behind images half the country grew up with. It's for viewers who like it when the museum placard suddenly opens onto a real, flawed person. Stream Art and Fact (2023) online on iFILM.