Lisbon Story is partially a sequel to Wim Wenders' 1982 film, The State of Things. The fictitious film director Friedrich Monroe reappears, again played by Patrick Bauchau, continuing the thread of a creator who wrestles with the fate of images.
In this chapter, Friedrich Monroe has moved to Lisbon, Portugal—the same country that framed The State of Things. The story centers on the principal character, Philip Winter, a sound engineer who receives a postcard inviting him to the city to record its sounds for Friedrich’s upcoming project. Upon arriving, Winter finds Friedrich’s house packed with editing equipment and countless reels of film, yet the director himself is missing. A handful of children who seem to work with him tell him Friedrich will return, though they cannot say when. What begins as a simple assignment quickly spirals into a personal quest to track down the missing filmmaker.
As Winter searches, the film gradually reveals Friedrich’s deeper motive. He has become preoccupied with the idea of capturing the city’s unseen image—a version of Lisbon that escapes the filmmaker’s own subjective gaze. To achieve this, he imagines a radically non-invasive approach: a rolling camera strapped to his back, or carried in plastic bags with holes cut for the lens, so the image could be shown to no one, and thus not die with the viewer. This philosophy marks a stark departure from traditional cinema, and it stands in contrast to his earlier plan to shoot with an early hand-cranked motion picture camera, an endeavor he calls “pretending that the whole history of cinema had never happened.” The tension between preserving the city in a pure, unfiltered form and the commercial pressures surrounding visual culture drives the narrative forward.
The ending circles back to sound as the bridge between creators. Winter finally meets Friedrich, and through their reunion, he persuades the director to merge his original ambition with Winter’s own medium: sound. The two agree to pursue a collaborative path that combines the old-school visual approach with a complementary acoustic perspective, thereby reimagining how a city can be experienced on screen.
A semi-non-fictional beat punctuates the film with the appearance of the renowned Portuguese folk group Madredeus and the filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, blending documentary reality with fiction in a way that underscores the film’s meditation on art, memory, and the evolving language of cinema.
