Watch Searching For Kurosawa (2025) Official Trailer

A college student records behind-the-scenes of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, only for the footage to be confiscated—until he reunites with it three decades later.

Searching for Kurosawa chronicles Kawamura Mitsuhiko’s journey from the set of Kurosawa’s Ran in 1985 to its final release three decades later. Now, with the rediscovered clips and Mitsuhiko’s own recollections, the film pieces together an intimate portrait of cinema’s “Emperor,” revealing how a young cinephile’s passion helped preserve invaluable fragments of film history. In the course of unearthing lost footage, Kawamura’s life takes an ironic course; he loved movies so much that his life became a movie.