Ikiru

A bureaucrat’s life finds new meaning in Kurosawa’s classic original, the source for Bill Nighy’s brilliant drama, Living.

Never one to shy away from grand themes, Akira Kurosawa here tackles the biggest and simplest of existential issues: the fact of mortality and the impact that the inevitability of death has on an individual life. A diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer forces a bureaucrat to take stock of his life and to seek some way of giving it meaning. Built around a superb central performance from Takashi Shimura, this is a classic of humanist cinema.

Kurosawa wrote the script with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni, creating not only a powerful indictment of bureaucracy but also a hard-boiled metaphysical affirmation of the moral message found in the title – Ikiru means to live. Ranked joint 157th in the 2022 Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll