Kurosawa & Mifune

Friday, October 21 - Monday, December 26, 2016

“The director Akira Kurosawa and the actor Toshiro Mifune worked together on some of the most remarkable films ever made, films that have passed into legend, like SEVEN SAMURAI and RASHOMON. If you do not know their work, I envy you, because you have some of your most sublime moviegoing experiences ahead of you.” – Roger Ebert

KUROSAWA & MIFUNE, a celebration of one of cinema’s greatest collaborations, unfolds Fridays-Sundays at 11:00am October 21-December 26 in IFC Center’s ongoing “Weekend Classics” program. Presented in conjunction with the November 25 opening of the new documentary MIFUNE: THE LAST SAMURAI, an examination of the actor’s life and career, the series showcases some of director Akira Kurosawa and star Toshiro Mifune’s most acclaimed films. A film schedule for the Weekend Classics screenings is below, with additional shows to be announced for the week of November 25-December 1. A related exhibition of international posters is on view in the Posteritati at IFC Center gallery on the theater’s second floor.

Born in Tokyo in 1910, Akira Kurosawa is widely recognized as one of cinema’s most important filmmakers. After directing seven features from 1943 to 1947, he cast the then-unknown Toshiro Mifune in his 1948 DRUNKEN ANGEL,as a doomed, tubercular gangster befriended by a troubled physician. Following that film’s success, Kurosawa and Mifune’s next collaboration would be STRAY DOG, with Mifune playing a young cop desperate to track down the gun a pickpocket lifted from him. Together, the pair would make 14 other films, among them the groundbreaking RASHOMON, the Venice Film Festival winner that brought Japanese cinema to the world’s attention; the vastly influential landmark SEVEN SAMURAI; Shakespeare-inspired dramas like THRONE OF BLOOD and THE BAD SLEEP WELL; and the masterful YOJIMBO and SANJURO, the samurai films in which Mifune incarnated one of cinema’s most indelible characters.

All films on 35mm, except for RASHOMON, which screens on DCP. 

 

 

Series Films

Past Films