Lisbon Story

Wim Wenders made Lisbon Story (1994) almost by accident, returning to the Portuguese capital a decade after his unfinished documentary The State of Things to fulfil a commission marking Lisbon's year as European Capital of Culture. What emerged is one of his most personal and beguiling films — a love letter to a city, to sound, and to the act of filmmaking itself, made by one of the central figures of the New German Cinema.

Rüdiger Vogler, Wenders's longtime screen alter ego, plays Philip Winter, a sound engineer summoned to Lisbon to help a vanished director complete a silent film. Wandering the city with his microphones, recording footsteps and trams and the wind, he becomes entranced by the place and by the haunting fado-inflected music of Madredeus, whose singer Teresa Salgueiro appears as herself. The veteran Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira makes a cameo, deepening the film's meditation on cinema's past and future. Wenders shoots Lisbon as a city of light, decay and melody, where the recording of reality becomes a kind of devotion.

Programmed at Cannes in Un Certain Regard, the film became a quiet word-of-mouth favourite and did more than any other to introduce Madredeus to international audiences. Gentle, essayistic and unhurried, it is a lesser-known gem in the Wenders filmography — a work about looking and listening that rewards viewers willing to slow down and wander the streets alongside it.