Skip to main content
Perfect Days film image; happy people on bench looking at sky

Perfect Days

This event has passed

Widely acclaimed as Wim Wenders’ best (fiction) film since his glory days in the 1980s, Perfect Days is a humanist character study steeped in the director’s admiration for the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu and, as British critic Mark Kermode suggested, an exercise in mindful moviemaking. The great Japanese actor Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance; Cure; Tokyo Sonata) stars as Hirayama, whose menial work cleaning public toilets is off-set by his rich interior life; his appreciation for music (Lou Reed; The Kinks; Van Morrison), literature (Patricia Highsmith; Faulkner) and nature.

Mindfulness, as a movie.

Mark Kermode

In its polite and unassuming way, the film advocates not just a new way of looking, but also a new way of living.

Wendy Ide, The Observer

The director has crafted a film of deceptive simplicity, observing the tiny details of a routine existence with such clarity, soulfulness and empathy that they build a cumulative emotional power almost without you noticing.

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Director

Wim Wenders

Cast

Koji Yakusho, Yumi Asô, Tokio Emoto, Sayuri Ishikawa, Tomokazu Miura, Min Tanaka

Credits
Country of Origin

Japan/Germany

Year

2023

Language

In Japanese with English subtitles

Awards

Best Actor, Cannes, Japan Academy Film Prize; Best Director, Japan Academy

Nominee: Best International Film, Academy Awards

19+
123 min

Book Tickets

This event has passed.

Credits

Screenwriter

Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki

Cinematography

Franz Lustig

Editor

Toni Froschhammer

Production Design

Towako Kuwajima

Also Playing

The Stand

Dir. Christopher Auchter
95 min

This rousing doc explores a 1985 dispute over logging in the Haida Gwaii. Taking us from canny retrospective commentary to the thick of the action, director Chris Auchter employs animation and a wealth of archival footage to riveting effect.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Resident Orca

Dir. Sarah Sharkey Pearce & Simon Schneider
97 min

Captured in Puget Sound in 1970, killer whale Lolita spent the next half century in a cramped tank in Seaquarium, Miami. The film follows a coalition of Lummi elders, animal lovers and philanthropists on a rescue mission to return her to the ocean.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

No Other Land

Dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor
96 min

Deemed by many critics one of the essential films of 2024, a multiple festival award winner and Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, No Other Land is a reminder that mass expulsion is by no means a new reality for Palestinians.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Misericordia

Dir. Alain Guiraudie
103 min

Edgy, eccentric, and unapologetically queer, this film goes from drama to comedy without putting a foot wrong. Sex and murder are the subjects, and writer-director Alain Guiraudie (Stranger by the Lake) mines them for suspense and outrageous laughs.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre