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

Bonnie Northgraves Quintet: To Louis with Love
man passionately playing a trumpet

Bonnie Northgraves Quintet: To Louis with Love

Dir. Bert Stern
160 min

Join us for To Louis with Love, a joyful celebration of the legendary Louis Armstrong by Bonnie Northgraves and her band, followed by Bert Stern's legendary concert film Jazz on a Summer's Day, featuring Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and of course Satchmo.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Scarecrow

Dir. Jerry Schatzberg
112 min

A bittersweet, touching buddy movie with Gene Hackman as a volatile tramp, Max, and Al Pacino as "Lion", a drifter now set on returning to the wife and kid he abandoned years ago. Hackman's favourite of his own movies.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

Husbands

Dir. John Cassavetes
142 min

Men behaving badly: reeling from the death of a friend, three middle-aged buddies go on an epic drinking binge. It's not enough. They roll home, collect their passports, and take off for a weekend of gambling, women and booze in London.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Nashville
Nashville film image; large group of people posing by a podium

Nashville

Dir. Robert Altman
159 min

With 26 actors getting more-or-less equal screen time and half of them singing their own tunes, Robert Altman's state-of-the-nation satire on bicentennial USA is a movie that repays multiple views.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema