A Message from Akira Kurosawa: For Beautiful Movies

Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.

This 150-minute documentary, directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi on the set of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, features behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.

In postwar Tokyo, beloved writer-professor Hyakken Uchida retires and is buoyed through hardship by the fierce devotion of his former students, who honor him each year with a raucous “Not yet!” birthday toast. Told in warm, gently comic vignettes, Kurosawa’s farewell celebrates aging, friendship, and the sustaining ritual of teacher and pupils refusing to say goodbye.

An elderly Nagasaki hibakusha spends a summer caring for her four grandchildren, whose curiosity about the 1945 bombing stirs buried memories and moral questions. When an American nephew from Hawaii visits, the family confronts grief, guilt, and the possibility of reconciliation across generations.

An intimate chronicle of the shooting of Ran (1985), a film directed by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

In an age when women were incapable of joining the artistic dialogue, Lilias Trotter managed to win the favour of celebrated critics.

O-Shin is a young brothel worker who, one night, helps a young samurai escape from his pursuers. Against the warnings of her fellow workers, particularly Kikuno and the brothel's owner, O-Shin falls in love with the samurai.

Behind the scenes of Akira Kurosawa's Ran, produced by Kurosawa Productions.