Fartsa (Season 1)

Fartsa (2015) is a Russian historical drama series you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Yegor Baranov. It's 1961 Moscow: four childhood friends in their twenties, no money, big ambitions, and access to a thriving underground trade in foreign goods and hard currency — the fartsa. Getting caught meant a labor camp. They do it anyway.

Alexander Petrov, Filipp Gorenshteyn, Maxim Emelyanov, and Zoya Berber lead the cast across a thirty-year span that runs all the way to the Soviet collapse in 1991. Each decade the stakes go up, the money gets better, and the men drift further from who they were at twenty. Less a crime thriller than a generational portrait — what it looks like when the system gives people no legal way to chase what they want. Stream Fartsa online on iFILM.