One of the greatest films of Japanese cinema and of the entire history of cinema, a masterpiece by the master Akira Kurosawa, returns to the big screen at Giunti Odeon, in a splendid uncut restored version. 16th century. While civil wars rage, the peasants of a village manage to convince seven samurai to defend them against a band of forty marauders. In reality there are only six samurai because the seventh (played by the prodigious Toshiro Mifune) is a peasant who has learnt to fight, a key character in the film's unprecedented social dialectic between the noble caste of disarmed warriors and the humiliated and offended people. This essential aspect of the film was almost wiped out by the brutal cuts imposed by the production (forty minutes for the Japanese edition and even seventy for the international one), which impoverished the complexity of tones and registers of the complete version. Of this masterpiece (one of the greatest successes of Japanese cinema) the narrative scansion, the plastic and figurative strength of the battle scenes and the character design are admirable. The Seven Samurai is an epic in its own right - it is an epic of the human spirit because very few films have gone so far, to show so much, to indicate the surprising and frightening extent of sacrifice, and daring to oppose impending chaos with personal courage, selfless gesture and choice.