The high-budget miniseries, War & Peace shot in a number of locations throughout Lithuania including Kaunus County and Bauska.
The BBC’s historical drama The Eichmann Show filmed on location in Vilnius, Lithuania. Feelgood Fiction doubled the city for Jerusalem to recreate the infamous 1961 trial of prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann.
A central challenge during pre- production was finding suitable filming locations to recreate the Jerusalem courtroom where the drama unfolded, and the control room where TV producer Milton Fruchtman marshalled the filming of each day’s testimony.
The original courtroom in Jerusalem is now used as a local community centre and so wasn’t a feasible location for the shoot. Scouting led to sites being considered in London, Belfast and Leeds in the UK before the team arrived in Vilnius where they found a cinema screening room that was a huge concrete monument to the Soviet Union.
Lithuania offers production support through the Vilnius Film Office in the capital. The country has a 20% filming incentive administered by the Lithuanian Film Centre.
We were looking for the hero location. Vilnius had a cinema screening room that was a huge concrete monument to the Soviet Union. The interior layout was in fact almost identical to that of the real location in Jerusalem.
Laurence Bowen, Feelgood Fiction
Lithuania’s climate is both oceanic and continental. Summers are mild and wet. Winters are cold, with average temperatures below freezing. The weather is changeable all year round. Rainfall is common, but more likely on the coast. Main crops are grain, potatoes, sugar beets, flax and vegetables.
