Ikiru

Takashi Shimura portrays Kanji Watanabe, an aging bureaucrat with stomach cancer forced to strip the veneer off his existence and find meaning in his final days.

Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru details the existential struggle of one ordinary man in his desperate search for purpose. Upon learning he has terminal stomach cancer, a low-level government bureaucrat leaves his job of thirty years without a word to find meaning in the year he has left to live. He is completely alone in the world -- his wife is dead, his son is practically estranged, and his co-workers are little more than strangers. Rather than face a death alone in pathos, Shimura opts to make up for lost time by going to the bar, spending every last yen in his wallet and drinking himself to death. There he meets a black-clad artist who leads him on a hellish tour of the city after dark as the two crawl through every booze-soaked juke-joint in town.