Celebrate Japanese Director, Akira Kurosawa, throughout the month of May on UCSD-TV’s World Cinema Saturdays!
A true auteur and one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Kurosawa became the first Japanese director to be acclaimed abroad for his works in the film industry. He accepted many awards, including the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, as well as the Golden Lion award in the Venice Film Festival for his film, Rashomon.
Since his entry into the film industry in 1936, Kurosawa directed 30 films in a fruitful career that lasted 57 years. His pictures cut across genres and settings, indulging equally his love of John Ford’s Westerns, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, the work of French director Jean Renoir, and his native bushido code. Kurosawa exerted a profound influence on international cinema while fiercely asserting his individuality as an artist.
This month’s mini-festival features classics from Kurosawa’s “middle period,” during which he consolidated and developed his technique and mature thematic concerns. You can find a list of his films here, or check out the list below!
Sanshiro Sugata
Sugata, a young man, struggles to learn the nuance and meaning of judo, and in doing so comes to learn something of the meaning of life.
(Japan, 1943, 79 mins, dir. Akira Kurosawa, with Denjiro Okochi & Yukiko Todoroki, Japanese with English subtitles)
No Regrets For Our Youth
Kurosawa’s first “personal” film is a feminist study of a young woman’s journey to self-discovery in post-war Japan.
(Japan, 1946, B&W, 110 mins, dir. Akira Kurosawa, with Setsuko Hara & Susumu Fujita, Japanese with English subtitles)
Stray Dog
Murukami, a young homicide detective, has his pocket picked on a bus and loses his pistol. Frantic and ashamed, he dashes about trying to recover the weapon without success until taken under the wing of an older and wiser detective, Sato. Together they track the culprit.
(Japan, 1949, B&W, 120 min, dir. Akira Kurosawa, with Toshiro Mifune & Takashi Shimura, Japanese with English subtitles.)
Ikiru
Kanji Watanabe is a longtime bureaucrat in a city office who, along with the rest of the office, spends his entire working life doing nothing. He learns he is dying of cancer and wants to find some meaning in his life.
(Japan, 1952, 142 mins, dir. Akira Kurosawa, with Takashi Shimura & Nobuo Kanoko, Japanese with English subtitles)