Shemaroo's Akira Kurosawa fest in Kolkata

The year 2009 is the centenary birth anniversary of the renowned Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and Shemaroo World Cinema is celebrating him, his persona, his being and his spirit by organising an extravagant festival in four cities.

Shemaroo World Cinema's Kurosawa Film Festival will be held with as much magnificence in - Kolkata, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi – as the film maker himself.

The festival will kickstart on July 24, 2009 in Kolkata and will continue till September 2009 in the other cities.

Shemaroo World Cinema will launch four Kurosawa titles on DVD – Rashomon, Ran, Madadayo and Quiet Duel. These titles will now be available to Kurosawa fans across India, with bonus features and Hindi sub-titles.

A three-day, back-to-back screening on weekends – Friday, Saturday, Sunday – is going to be the order of the day, at this splendid festival.

Akira Kurosawa Profile

After training as a painter, Kurosawa entered the film industry in 1936 as an assistant director, making his directorial debut in 1943. After working in a wide range of genres, he made his breakthrough film Rashomon in 1950. It won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and first revealed the richness of Japanese cinema to the West.

Kurosawa's films have always been more popular in the West than in his native Japan, where critics have viewed his adaptations of Western genres and authors (William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Maxim Gorky and Evan Hunter) with suspicion – but he's revered by American and European filmmakers, who remade Shichinin no samurai (1954), as The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yojimbo (1961), as Per un pugno di dollari (1964) and Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (1958), as Star Wars (1977).