General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Lisbon Story

Lisbon Story (Portuguese release title Viagem a Lisboa) is a 1994 feature film directed by Wim Wenders, a German-Portuguese co-production in which a sound engineer travels to Lisbon to help a filmmaker friend finish a silent film about the city and, finding him missing, wanders the city recording its sounds.¹^•² The film was commissioned for Lisboa 94, the year Lisbon served as European Capital of Culture, and it doubles as a tribute to cinema itself in the centenary year of the medium.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenplay	Wim Wenders, with Donata Wenders credited on the screenplay¹
Production	Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH (Berlin) and Madragoa Filmes (Lisbon); producers Ulrich Felsberg, Paulo Branco, Wim Wenders¹
Commission	Made at the invitation of Lisboa 94, European Capital of Culture, in cooperation with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Cologne)¹^•³
Cast	Rüdiger Vogler (Phillip Winter), Patrick Bauchau (Friedrich Munroe), Teresa Salgueiro and the band Madredeus, with a special appearance by Manoel de Oliveira¹
Music	Jürgen Knieper, with music performed by Madredeus¹
Format and length	35 mm color, 1:1.66, Dolby Stereo SR; 103 min per the Wim Wenders Stiftung press sheet, while several databases list 100 or 104 minutes¹^•⁴^•⁵
Release	Preview at the Cinema Tivoli, Lisbon, 16 December 1994; German first release 18 May 1995; screened at Cannes 1995 in Un Certain Regard⁶^•¹^•⁷
Restoration	4K restoration completed in 2019 for the film's 25th anniversary, funded through the German film-heritage program Förderprogramm Filmerbe⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The story begins with a postcard carrying a cryptic message from the filmmaker Friedrich Munroe (Patrick Bauchau) to his friend, the sound engineer Phillip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler): "Dear Phil. I can't go on m.o.s.! S.O.S.! Come to Lisbon with all your stuff a.s.a.p.!" The abbreviation m.o.s., a piece of sound-era jargon attributed by legend to Erich von Stroheim ("mit out sound"), signals that Friedrich is shooting without sound.⁹

Winter, his leg in a cast, crosses Europe from north to south and arrives in Lisbon to find that Friedrich has disappeared, leaving behind an unfinished film: images without sound, shot on the streets with an old hand-cranked camera like Buster Keaton's in The Cameraman.² Friedrich, the film explains, wanted to make a film as if the whole history of cinema had never happened.⁹ Winter decides to stay and patiently put sound to the images, wandering the city with a microphone and recording its characteristic noises. He meets the band Madredeus and its singer Teresa (Teresa Salgueiro), to whom he is not indifferent, and he talks with the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira about God, art, and cinema. Friedrich remains untraceable; at one point a thief runs off with Winter's money, leading him to suspect his friend has ventured into rough neighborhoods.² In the Google Play synopsis, Monroe is meanwhile cruising the city with a camcorder trying to catch unseen pictures, and the two eventually meet, with Winter convincing Monroe to finish the film.¹⁰

Commission and production

Wenders was approached by the City of Lisbon to make a film celebrating the city's selection as European Capital of Culture for 1994. He chose not to make a documentary, although he wanted the city to serve as the main character, and while preparing the film he met Madredeus and decided to include them in the story. The band happened to have twelve unpublished songs about Lisbon, which Wenders used as his script.¹¹

The film grew out of Wenders's earlier relationship with Portugal. He had shot The State of Things (Der Stand der Dinge, 1982) largely in the Sintra area, returned for parts of Until the End of the World (1991), and described falling in love with Lisbon the first time he saw it, in the winter of 1979, when the city seemed asleep and about to wake; by 1994, in his telling, it was fully awake.¹²^•¹³ Friedrich Munroe is the same director character from The State of Things, and the film also functions as a homage to Wenders's Road Movie trilogy of the 1970s (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, Kings of the Road).¹⁴

Shooting took place in May and June 1994, on location in Lisbon neighborhoods including Alfama, Mouraria, Chelas, and Campolide, with original photography on video, 16 mm, and 35 mm.⁶ Lisa Rinzler was the director of photography, Vasco Pimentel the sound recordist, and Jürgen Knieper the composer.¹

Themes and reception

Critics have read the film as a meditation on what it means to make films a hundred years after their invention; Keith Phipps described it as playing like a cross between Lumière and Company, the centennial tribute in which Wenders also participated, and The Third Man.¹⁵ The BFI characterizes it as a sly homage to The Third Man with a nod to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and calls it one of Wenders's most entertaining and intriguing films.¹⁶ Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it a dreamy philosophical travelogue made in indulgently poetic style.¹⁵ Reception was not uniformly warm: Dennis Schwartz gave it a C-, writing that Wenders had little feel for comedy and that the Buster Keaton-style comedic skits fell flat.¹⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 86% Tomatometer from three critics, and IMDb lists a 7.1 rating from about 6,000 users.¹⁷^•⁴

Scholars have examined the film's image of the city. Mariana Liz notes that Lisbon appears at once traditional and modern, with blue skies, the river's reflecting waters, and the narrow alleys of the historical center matched on the soundtrack by the melancholic music of Madredeus, inviting tourists who had not yet arrived while highlighting the progress still to come.¹⁸ Mazierska and Rascaroli, as cited by Liz, consider that the film presents a touristic and stereotyped representation of the Portuguese capital, and the Madredeus songs heard in the film include "Guitarra" and "Alfama", named for a traditional working-class neighborhood and key symbols of Lisbon.¹⁹ The film's soundtrack brought international recognition to Madredeus.⁹

Release and restoration

The film premiered in Lisbon at the Cinema Tivoli on 16 December 1994 as an ante-estreia (preview), with the Portuguese general release on 12 May 1995 and the German first release on 18 May 1995.³^•⁶^•¹ It was shown at the 1995 Festival de Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, and received nominations at the 1996 German Film Award and, in Italy, a Nastro d'Argento nomination for best director of a foreign film.⁷ In Spain it drew 60,793 spectators after its release on 24 April 1996.⁵

Only three 35 mm prints of the film were known to survive, and no digital exhibition version had ever been made. Restoration work began in June 2019 with duplication, color correction, retouching, and stabilization, and the original negative together with the monochrome scenes shot on the hand-cranked camera were scanned at 4K resolution. The 4K restoration was completed for the film's 25th anniversary with support from the Förderprogramm Filmerbe, financed by Germany's Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the federal states, and the FFA, and the Wim Wenders Stiftung has since circulated the restored version, describing the film as Wenders's "most European film".⁸^•²⁰^•¹³ A restored 4K copy returned to Portuguese cinemas through Leopardo Filmes.²¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1990s and 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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