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There are few cinematic collaborations as iconic as the long-standing partnership between director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune. Over the course of 16 films between 1948 and 1965, they established themselves the premier duo of post-war Japanese cinema.

Existing a world apart from their better known samurai films, I Live in Fear (also known as Record of a Living Being) is a singular and essential part of their shared history. Mifune, aged beyond his years with detailed make up, portrays an elderly businessman whose anxieties around a new atomic attack on Japan drive a wedge between him and his family. As he tries to coax them to move to what he considers the safe haven of Brazil, they increasingly isolate themselves from his paranoia.

Kurosawa's film is a fascinating insight into the Japanese psyche a decade after the end of the Second World War. It is a portrait of post-war disquiet and generational divide in a country that was still emerging from two of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century.