De André and the members of PFM had known each other since 1969, when the band, then known as Quelli ("Those ones"), featuring Teo Teocoli as their lead vocalist and mainly active as session musicians, had played on his album La buona novella.

The Genoan singer-songwriter, who at the time was also suffering from a lack of motivation and stimuli, enthusiastically accepted the band's proposal, and told them he would perform the arrangements on the road with them, as a tour, which was later immortalized by the two-volume live album.

However, music critics at the time, comparing the tour to Bob Dylan "going electric" in 1965, lauded the tour itself, and its resulting live albums, for their great originality, and praised De André's audacity in going beyond the commonly accepted "minimal" attitude of 1970s singer-songwriters (according to which the number of instruments which were played alongside the singing, and the quality of the playing itself, had a much lesser importance than the lyrics) and "dressing up" his songs in beautiful musical arrangements, which thus became just as relevant as his lyrics.

The film also includes a scene from the same show, referred to by Di Cioccio in an interview excerpt, where De André, fittingly with the audience's reactions, sarcastically sings a line from "Amico fragile" as "And while I was sitting amongst your fuck-offs..." instead of ending it with the correct word, "goodbyes".

In 2007, sound engineer Paolo Iafelice, who took care of field recordings for De André's 1994 album Anime salve and later worked as a technical engineer on his posthumous releases (as well as on live recordings by De André's firstborn son Cristiano), undertook an extensive remix of both albums, by carrying them through a process of "de-mastering" - i.e. going back to the original 1979 tapes and removing all subsequent layers of remastering to obtain a flat transfer of the tapes themselves, then carefully mixing them anew in order to bring out previously obscured details.

It featured Cristiano De André on lead vocals, accompanied by the current members of PFM (i.e. Di Cioccio, Djivas and Fabbri - Premoli and Mussida having left the band respectively in 2005 and 2015), plus several guest musicians.

[9] In late 2019, writer, film director and former politician Walter Veltroni was informed by a friend of his, independent filmmaker Piero Frattari, that the latter's single-camera shot of the 3 January 1979 Genoa show had been painstakingly restored from three 40-year-old Betamax tapes which had been forgotten and left languishing at the bottom of a videotape archive, and the video quality was now up to par.

Photographer Guido Harari and Genoan music archivist Antonio Vivaldi, named after the famed Baroque composer but unrelated to him (although he admits that a bizarre twist of fate made him a music lover), were also filmed: Harari shares his memories of shooting De André and the band members both onstage and backstage, while Vivaldi reminisces about being in the audience at the same show in Genoa filmed by Frattari and later ripping a poster for the show off a wall; he states that he has kept the poster in his personal collection for 40 years.

The opening scene of the film consists of an aerial zoom shot, moving downwards, of "L'Agnata", the De André family cottage in Gallura, accompanied by an off-screen narration by Ghezzi: she states that De André had always been wary of technology since he moved to Sardinia, then proceeds to tell a humorous story about De André's first mobile phone, which she convinced him to buy around the same time as the PFM tour; after the first two months, he received a bill of nineteen million lire, roughly equivalent to 9,500 euros, because somebody had cloned his phone, and decided to bury it at the bottom of a fig tree in his garden, jokingly celebrating its funeral; Ghezzi ends her narration by wondering whether the phone is still there.

The opening and closing credits feature a guitar composition titled "Stay", by jazz guitarist Alessandro Di Virgilio,[10] as the only piece of "score" (other than De André and PFM's music), which also appears at the end of Antonio Vivaldi's scene.