Perfect Days

Wim Wenders' Perfect Days began as an unusual commission. The Tokyo Toilet Project — a public-art initiative that hired sixteen architects, including Tadao Ando and Shigeru Ban, to redesign public lavatories across Shibuya — invited Wenders to make a series of short films about the project. He proposed a feature instead. The result, co-written with Takuma Takasaki, was shot in seventeen days in Tokyo with a small Japanese crew.

Kōji Yakusho — the veteran star of Shall We Dance?, Cure and 13 Assassins — plays the central role and won Best Actor at Cannes 2023, the first Japanese actor to win the prize at the festival. The film was selected as Japan's submission for the 2024 Academy Awards despite its German co-production status, and earned a nomination for Best International Feature Film. Wenders was also nominated for Best Director at the European Film Awards. Cinematography is by Franz Lustig, Wenders' longtime collaborator, working in 35mm and Academy ratio.

The soundtrack — built around Lou Reed's Perfect Day, Patti Smith, Otis Redding and Van Morrison on cassette — became its own cultural object, charting in Japan and reissued on vinyl. The film extended Wenders' decades-long fascination with Japan, which began with the documentary Tokyo-Ga in 1985 and his friendship with Yasujirō Ozu's collaborators. It plays, in many ways, as the late-period reply to that earlier essay-film.