Bath Film Festival 2008

Ikiru is the tale of a lonely man facing death in post-war Tokyo. One of the greatest actors of Japanese cinema, Takashi Shimura, plays Kanji Watanabe, a civil servant who has slavishly devoted himself to his job for thirty years, only to find that he now has inoperable stomach cancer. With limited time left, and the feeling that he has never truly lived at all, Watanabe embarks on a quest to make the most of his remaining days. After bouts of self-pity and hedonism and a doomed attempt at a platonic relationship, he commits himself doggedly to the task of converting a city dump into a children's playground. Tough-minded and unsentimental throughout, this is one of Kurosawa's finest films and also offers a vivid portrait of post-war Tokyo. ‘A masterpiece of humanist cinema' - Empire.