Seven Samurai

Seven Samurai
Seven Samurai
	Theatrical release poster
Japanese name
Kanji	七人の侍
Revised Hepburn
Transcriptions
Revised Hepburn	Shichinin no Samurai
Directed by	Akira Kurosawa
Written by	Akira Kurosawa; Shinobu Hashimoto; Hideo Oguni;
Produced by	Sōjirō Motoki
Starring	Toshiro Mifune; Takashi Shimura; Keiko Tsushima; Isao Kimura; Daisuke Katō; Seiji Miyaguchi; Yoshio Inaba; Minoru Chiaki; Kamatari Fujiwara; Kokuten Kōdō; Yoshio Tsuchiya; Eijiro Tono; Jun Tatara; Atsushi Watanabe; Yoshio Kosugi; Bokuzen Hidari; Yukiko Shimazaki;
Cinematography	Asakazu Nakai
Edited by	Akira Kurosawa
Music by	Fumio Hayasaka
Production; company	Toho
Distributed by	Toho
Release date	April 26, 1954;
Running time	207 minutes (with intermission)
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Budget	¥210 million ($580,000) or US$556,000
Box office	Japan rentals: ¥268.2 million ($2.3 million) ; USA: $833,533

Seven Samurai (Japanese: 七人の侍, Hepburn: Shichinin no Samurai) is a 1954 Japanese epic samurai action film directed by Akira Kurosawa from a screenplay co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni. Taking place in 1586 in the Sengoku period of Japanese history, it follows the story of a village of desperate farmers who seek to hire samurai to combat bandits who will return after the harvest to steal their crops.

At the time, the film was the most expensive film made in Japan. It took a year to shoot and faced many difficulties. It was the second-highest-grossing domestic film in Japan in 1954. Many reviews compared the film to the Western film genre.

Seven Samurai is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films in cinema history. Since its release, it has consistently ranked highly in critics' lists of greatest films, such as the BFI's Sight & Sound and Rotten Tomatoes polls. It was also voted the greatest foreign-language film of all time in the BBC's 2018 international critics' poll. It is regarded as one of the most "remade, reworked, and referenced" films in cinema.