Most of us have heard variations of the common wisdom that, when it comes to two conflicting accounts, the truth is usually located somewhere in the middle. But what about three or four accounts, all starkly different? Can the truth ever really be found? No film has explored the unattainability of objective truth as brilliantly and memorably as Rashomon, the hugely influential 1950 classic directed by the great Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa.
Set in Kyoto circa the 12th century, the film famously contains four separate accounts of the same incident, narrated by four different characters whose wildly contradictory stories agree only on the most basic fact: a samurai has been killed.
