Guest from the Future (Season 1)

Guest from the Future (Gostya iz budushchego, 1985) is a beloved Soviet family sci-fi series you can watch online on iFILM. A sixth-grader named Kolya pops out to buy kefir, stumbles onto a time machine hidden in an old building, and steps straight into the Moscow of the future.

There he learns about the myelophone — a device that reads minds — and the two space pirates, Krys and Jolly U, who will do anything to steal it. To keep it out of their hands, a girl from the future, Alisa Selezneva, travels back to 1984. The pirates follow, and soon Kolya's whole class is caught up in a chase the grown-ups never even notice, leaving the kids to defend the gadget on their own. It's adapted from Kir Bulychev's novel One Hundred Years Ahead.

Directed by Pavel Arsenov, this five-part film raised more than one generation of Soviet kids: Natalya Guseva's Alisa became a nationwide symbol of a kind, hopeful tomorrow, and its theme song "Prekrasnoye Daleko" turned into a genuine standard. Naive by modern standards, maybe, yet so warm and charming that people keep coming back to it decades later. Stream Guest from the Future (1985) online on iFILM.