The Dragon Syndrome (Season 1)

The Dragon Syndrome (Синдром дракона, 2012) is a Russian-Ukrainian crime series you can watch online on iFILM. In 1993, investigators in the small Ukrainian city of Kirovograd uncover a collection of antiquities worth close to a billion dollars — stashed in the apartment of an ordinary electrician named Alexander Ilyin. Nobody can account for how it got there.

Director Nikolai Khomeriki builds the story around one of the theories that circulated for fifteen years after the discovery. The trail leads back to Germany in 1953, where corrupt Soviet officers helped themselves to jewellery seized from people sent to the camps. A young intelligence operative named Terekhov and a collector named Avdeev — a man fresh out of prison — are brought in to guard the haul. Alexei Serebryakov, Leonid Bichevin, Andrei Merzlikin, and Alexei Guskov star in a thriller that moves between eras, using stolen wealth as a lens on how long impunity can last. Watch The Dragon Syndrome online on iFILM.