Dersu Uzala Reviews

Back in the 90’s, I had the pleasure to discover Akira Kurosawa’s movies and I became overnight a huge fan of his work.  I think this movie must be the only one he made outside of Japan (in fact, he already tried to make 2 movies in the USA, ‘Runaway Train’ and ‘Tora! Tora! Tora’, but both projects turned out to be some disasters and he left both of them). Back then, Kurosawa was going through a really difficult period as his last movie ‘Dô desu ka den’ turned out to be a major box-office failure. In fact, the situation was so bad that he was not unable to get any money anymore to make something else and it is rather sad to think that the best Japanese director wouldn’t get any support in his home country. As a result, he got so depressed that he even attempted suicide and, even though he survived, it was unclear for a while if he would even ever make another movie. Eventually, a Soviet studio contacted  him to see if he would be interested in making a movie for them and this feature was the end-result. Anyway, I thought it was a great epic and the directing, the story, everything was quite spellbinding to behold. To conclude, I really loved the damned thing and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Akira Kurosawa’s work.