One of the greatest achievements by Akira Kurosawa, Ikiru shows the director at his most compassionate—affirming life through an exploration of death. Takashi Shimura beautifully portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer who is impelled to find meaning in his final days. Presented in a radically conceived two-part structure and shot with a perceptive, humanistic clarity of vision, Ikiru is a multifaceted look at what it means to be alive.
Ikiru
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Legend
OCOpen Captioned
Special Content
35mm
SFSensory Friendly
Ikiru
Feb. 5: Cinema Studies Screening & Lecture with NYU professor Gail Segal
Tickets: $35 (members), $40 (nonmembers)
"Were it the only film Kurosawa ever made, his name would be rightfully engraved on film history."
"Kurosawa achieves the piercing emotion and poetry of the Italian neorealists, but by opposite means: he doesn't make the camera disappear; instead... he deploys his camera so sharply and unerringly that it seems to take X-rays of the spirit."
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Cinema Studies Screening & Lecture by NYU professor Gail Segal
Thursday, Feb. 5 2026, 1:30
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- Gail Segal is a writer, filmmaker, and teacher at NYU's Graduate Film department. Her film work includes the Peabody Award-winning documentary Arguing the World (co-producer) and a 15-part PBS series, The Shakespeare Hour. More recently, she wrote and directed the award winning narrative short, Filigrane, set in the Empty Quarter of the U.A.E., as well as a documentary portrait of women textile workers in Turkey, entitled Meanwhile, in Turkey. She is currently in development on three narrative feature projects. Lila Rose, a participant in the 2018 Nicole Kidman/Meryl Streep/NYWIFT Writer’s Lab; Une Famille/One Family, following the siblings featured in Filigrane as they explore the limits of the nuclear family; and a third feature project, The Ferry Child, a post-pandemic love letter to New York City.
This film is part of the Kurosawa Restored series.
