A poor village seeks protection from ruthless bandits but lacks the funds to hire proper guards. An aging ronin (Takashi Shimura) sympathises with their plight, but he must round up a ragtag group of swordsmen, including a rascal with a heart of gold (Toshiro Mifune), for them to have a chance at surviving an impending raid. Director Akira Kurosawa’s jidaigeki is celebrated for its heart-racing action sequences and unforgettable cast of samurais played by veteran character actors such as Daisuke Kato, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki, and Isao Kimura.

Seven Samurai had a vast and profound influence on world cinema, stretching from Westerns to sci-fi epics. It also made a remarkable impression on cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing, the subject of our programme ‘Lightcatcher: The Cinematography of Mark Lee Ping-Bing.’ Lee recalls watching Seven Samurai, among many classic films, at his village’s bamboo theatre when he was a child. It was among the formative experiences that inspired his love for cinema and his career as a filmmaker.

Lee will introduce the screening of Seven Samurai on 27 November in Mandarin.

The film will be presented in 35 mm. Print courtesy of National Film Archive of Japan.

Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998, Japan) was one of the most widely admired filmmakers in world cinema. His film Rashomon (1951) was the first Japanese film to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. His collaboration with leading men Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura achieved even wider recognition with Seven Samurai, an action epic that inspired remakes such as The Magnificent Seven (1960). Besides his highly popular jidaigeki films, he was also known for his innovative adaptations of Shakespearean plays for the big screen, including Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and Ran (1985). After he left Toho in 1966, Kurosawa tested the waters in Hollywood but numerous difficulties derailed his plans. He returned to Japan to make his first colour film, Dodes'ka-den (1970), which was not the commercial comeback he had hoped for. Kurosawa survived an attempted suicide in 1971. He eventually returned to prominence with Dersu Uzala (1975), a biographical film about the titular native trapper in the Russian Far East. George Lucas, whose Star Wars (1977) was inspired by Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), and Francis Ford Coppola helped Kurosawa find funding for his war epic Kagemusha (1980), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival.