Best Films of 2024
Best Films of 2024 1. Perfect Days , dir. Wim Wenders. In 2020, the son of the founder of Fast Retailing (the parent company of Uniqlo), Koji Yanai, funded a series of bathrooms in Tokyo in preparation of the 2020 Olympics, designed by famous Japanese architects, including Shigeru Ban and Tadao Ando. Because of the strict COVID protocols in place in the summer of 2021 that limited the audiences allowed into Japan for the Games, few, if any, saw the bathrooms that Yanai funded. A year later, Yanai provided funding to the Toyo Film Festival, where Wim Wenders was chairing the jury panel, Yanai asked Wenders if he would be interested in making a short documentary about the bathrooms, since so few had seen them during the Games. Wenders toured the 17 bathrooms built in the Shibuya district, and told Yanai that he would not make a documentary, but he was intrigued about making a narrative film imagining the life of the janitor that woul...
