[2] Lisbon Story is partially a sequel to Wenders' 1982 film, The State of Things.

The sound engineer doesn't meet up with the director until the end of the movie, when it materialises that, disturbed by the commercialization of images, he had set out to capture what he terms the "unseen image" of the city, one devoid of the subjective view (executed by strapping a rolling camera onto his back, or carried about unaimed in plastic bags with holes cut for the lens), and then shown to no one, lest the source of the photo "die" with their viewing.

This is after giving up on his initial project shot using an early hand-cranked motion picture camera, what he calls "pretending that the whole history of cinema had never happened."

A semi-non-fictional aspect of the plot is the appearance of the internationally famous Portuguese folk music group Madredeus and Manoel de Oliveira.

During the mid-1970s, Wim Wenders made three films which have come to be referred to as The Road Movie Trilogy.