Year of Culture (Seasons 1–2)

Year of Culture (2018) is a Russian workplace comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Tito Kalatozishvili. The production team described it as a "corrective labor comedy" — a phrase that tells you everything about the protagonist's situation.

Viktor Sychev, a senior official at the Moscow Ministry of Education, tells the president exactly what he thinks. The punishment is swift: instead of his spacious office, he gets a faculty post at a struggling provincial university where his rank earns him no respect and the students have seen bureaucrats come and go. His target — push the institution into the national top-100 — turns out to be considerably harder than signing memos. Fyodor Bondarchuk plays a man who spent his career navigating bureaucratic politics and now has to navigate something far less predictable. Rinal Mukhametov and Maria Akhmetzyanova co-star. Stream Year of Culture online on iFILM.