Yōichi Matsue

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "Dodes'ka-den" (1970).

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "High and Low" (1963).

A British officer falls in love with his Japanese instructor at a military language school. They start a romance, but she is regarded as the enemy and is not accepted by his countrymen.

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "The Bad Sleep Well" (1960).

Documentary made by Toho for the Masterworks reissue of all of its Kurosawa films. This one focuses on "The Hidden Fortress" (1958).

A military explorer meets and befriends a Goldi man in Russia’s unmapped forests. A deep and abiding bond evolves between the two men, one civilized in the usual sense, the other at home in the glacial Siberian woods.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

Akira Kurosawa’s only television work—a lyrical documentary that follows a thoroughbred from birth and training to the Japan Derby—framed by a grandfather’s narration to his grandson about the fading bond between people and horses.

A pilot crash-lands in the African wilds, and loses his memory. He finds an old man living in the jungle with his grand-daughter. He falls in love with the young girl and settles down happily with them; their idyllic life broken only by a visit from his long forgotten fiancee.