Arena — Season 1, Episode 548: Kurosawa: Part Two
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
Concluding the profile of Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. International acclaim followed masterpieces like the influential 'Seven Samurai', but success at home was elusive. Unable to find funding for his epic films in Japan, Kurosawa attempted suicide in 1971. To make his late films 'Kagemusha', 'Ran' and 'Dreams' he accepted help from foreign admirers like George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.