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- Contains terminal illness theme, mild sex references and threat
Ikiru
Takashi Shimura is superb as a bureaucrat diagnosed with cancer in Akira Kurosawa’s lyrical and moving film about how we find meaning in our lives.
Drama 1952 143 mins
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Overview
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.
Contains terminal illness theme, mild sex references and threatRelated
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