Sarah Jilani

Witnesses have spoken of a wall of water that swept coastlines in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand...

Merkel gets up and says, I'm going.

And Tusk says, I'm locking the door.

Nobody's leaving.

I was not interested in politics, not a little bit.

Only how I can make it that it is not stupid, that it is a little more interesting.

That was my desire.

It was a very new way of storytelling, how you can use history as a trigger, how you can use something from the past which comes to effect in the present and transform people in the present.

I had to understand the depth of it and the suffering behind the civil war in Spain and what a child in war must have felt like.

So we had a lot of rehearsals and so I was exposed to all of it.

Seven Samurai, a Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa and produced by Sojiro Motoki, is released in 1954.

It's a three-and-a-half-hour black-and-white epic set in 16th-century Japan.

Farmers from a village threatened by bandits hire a veteran samurai for protection, and he finds six other samurai to join him.

It was being filmed when I was about 9 or 10, so I probably saw the film when I was around 10 or 11.

I was a child when I saw it, but even so, I found it interesting.

Hiso Kurosawa will grow up to become a movie producer himself, but when Seven Samurai is being filmed, he is a young boy living in Japan's capital, Tokyo.

His childhood and the movie industry are intertwined, as he lives with his mother, an actress, and father, the director, Akira Kurosawa.

Occasionally, he sees his father at work.

When they added some sound to Seven Samurai, I went to the studio and saw it.

Editing was probably the most important thing for Akira Kurosawa.