His career has been honored by many retrospectives, critical studies and biographies in both print and video, and by releases in many consumer media. Posthumously, he was named " Asian of the Century" in the "Arts, Literature, and Culture" category by AsianWeek magazine and CNN, cited there as being among the five people who most prominently contributed to the improvement of Asia in the 20th century. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Kiyoshi Kurosawa was awarded the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize for his film Tokyo Sonata.For fans of Kurosawas films, it was vindication from one of the worlds top film festivals of what theyve known for years: Kiyoshi Kurosawa is quite simply one of the most interesting and exciting filmmakers working in the world today. In 1990, he accepted the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. After the 1960s he became much less prolific even so, his later work-including his final two epics, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985)-continued to receive great acclaim, though more often abroad than in Japan. Kurosawa directed approximately one film per year throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, including a number of highly regarded (and often adapted) films, such as Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961). The commercial and critical success of that film opened up Western film markets for the first time to the products of the Japanese film industry, which in turn led to international recognition for other Japanese film-makers. Rashomon, which premiered in Tokyo, became the surprise winner of the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The two men would go on to collaborate on another fifteen films.
After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast the then little-known actor Toshiro Mifune in a starring role, cemented the director's reputation as one of the most important young film-makers in Japan. After years of working on numerous films as an assistant director and scriptwriter, he made his debut as a director during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata(a.k.a. Kurosawa entered the Japanese film industry in 1936, following a brief stint as a painter. He is regarded as one of the most important and influential film-makers in the history of cinema. Akira Kurosawa ( Japanese: 黒澤明, Hepburn: Kurosawa Akira, Ma– September 6, 1998) was a Japanese filmmaker and painter who directed 30 films in a career spanning 57 years.