The first Japanese director to be acclaimed abroad by both critics and audiences, Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998) is considered one of the world's greatest cinema auteurs because of his technical mastery and the universal humanist themes that pervade his work: a compassion for individual suffering, a quest for justice through personal rebellion against corrupt social structures, and a concern for the existential crises of ‘man’ in the face of death, social pressure, and the apparent meaningless of life’s struggles. However, because his films also acknowledge the danger that the ‘different,’ the ‘other,’ the ‘untranslatable’ will be annihilated as a consequence of this assumption of shared values and cultural sameness, Kurosawa’s work ultimately is a cinema of questioning.  Bridging the historical with the contemporary and Eastern cultural values with the West, Kurosawa’s pictures cut across genres, periods and settings, indulging equally his love of John Ford Westerns, Shakespeare, the work of French director Jean Renoir, and his native bushido code.  Kurosawa exerted a profound influence on international cinema while stubbornly asserting his individuality as a filmmaker, often at great cost as he struggled in his later years to find financing.  This month's mini-festival features classics from Kurosawa's prolific "middle period," during which he consolidated and expanded upon the thematic concerns and stylistic features developed during his tenure as a young studio contract director.