NEW YORK – A film about a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo and is perfectly content with his life was a big winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023.

Praised for its moving depiction of finding beauty and bliss in the ordinary, Perfect Days won the festival’s Best Actor gong for its Japanese star Koji Yakusho and was nominated for the highest prize, the Palme d’Or.

Directed by acclaimed German film-maker Wim Wenders, the drama is now in the running for Best International Feature at the Oscars in March – Japan’s first entry helmed by a foreigner. It opens exclusively at The Projector on Feb 8.

At a screening in New York in late 2023, Wenders – who co-wrote the movie with Japanese writer-producer Takuma Takasaki – says it all began with the country’s toilets.

The director, known for the road movie Paris, Texas (1984) and the romantic fantasy drama Wings Of Desire (1987), has long had a close connection with Japan.

He made two documentaries there: Tokyo-Ga (1985), about Japanese film-maker Yasujiro Ozu, and Notebook On Cities And Clothes (1989), about fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.

And Wenders was feeling “very homesick for Tokyo” when he received an invitation to visit the city again in 2022.

The authorities in the Shibuya district wanted him to make a series of short films about The Tokyo Toilet project, an initiative launched in 2018 to rehabilitate the image of public toilets there by getting top architects to redesign them.

“But I wasn’t all that interested in doing these short documentaries, and I realised there was something much bigger behind what I saw,” Wenders recalls.

“So I suggested doing a fictional story instead, and I thought I’d just talked myself out of a nice job. But they said, ‘Great’,” says the 78-year-old, who was thrice nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, including for Buena Vista Social Club (1999), a film about Cuban music.

One of Japan’s most respected actors, Yakusho, 68, said yes to starring in the new movie as soon as he heard Wenders’ name, before there was even a script.

The story of Perfect Days, which Wenders and co-writer Takasaki hammered out in just three weeks, follows his character, Hirayama, as he happily goes about his day.

And apart from the odd interaction with a colleague, the owner of his favourite restaurant or his niece, Hirayama’s life is spent mostly alone – reading books, listening to music, gardening and meticulously cleaning toilets.

Yakusho – who appeared in the Japanese romantic comedy drama Shall We Dance? (1996) and Hollywood films such as Memoirs Of A Geisha (2005) and Babel (2006) – says one thing that appealed to him about the role is “there aren’t a lot of lines”.

“And The Tokyo Toilet project is such a wonderful project,” he adds. “I wanted to contribute as much as I could.”

“For all of you who see the film, I hope you visit Shibuya and go to these 17 toilets and please relieve yourself,” he says with a smile.

Wenders has always been fascinated by Japan’s pristine public toilets and what they say about the culture as a whole, but he was also anxious to get that culture right.

“I was a little bit afraid with this film – because I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan and I like Japanese culture very much, but I still need to be very informed.

“That’s why it was great to have a (Japanese) co-writer and, every now and then, I did ask him questions – for instance, with the music he’s listening to, ‘Am I imposing my taste on a Japanese character?’”

But Takasaki assured him it was plausible Hirayama’s favourite tunes would be Western pop music from the 1960s and 1970s (classics by the likes of The Rolling Stones, Patti Smith and Lou Reed, whose 1972 song Perfect Day inspired the name of the film).

“These are Hirayama’s cassettes from when he was young, and he listened to exactly the same stuff as every young American and European man at the time. So don’t you worry,” the Japanese writer said.

“And that was a big relief,” Wenders says.

• Perfect Days opens exclusively at The Projector on Feb 8.