Amoeba Music

One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an explora­tion of death. Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived two­part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, Ikiru is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.

Special Features:

• Audio commentary from 2003 by Stephen Prince, author of The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa
• A Message from Akira Kurosawa: For Beautiful Movies (2000), a ninety­-minute documentary produced by Kurosawa Productions and featuring interviews with the director
• Documentary on Ikiru from 2003, created as part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create, and featuring interviews with Kurosawa, script supervisor Teruyo Nogami, writer Hideo Oguni, actor Takashi Shimura, and others
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic and travel writer Pico Iyer and a reprint from critic Donald Richie’s 1965 book The Films of Akira Kurosawa