Vilnius: Where the Chernobyl HBO Miniseries Came to Life
HBO’s acclaimed miniseries Chernobyl has been all the talk among movie-lovers and historians recently. The show depicts the morning of 26 April 1986 in Soviet Ukraine, and the events that followed. It brings the famous man-made nuclear catastrophe back to life on screen after 33 years after it happened in real-life, and manages to capture the horror so well viewers almost feel like they’re there in person.
However, Chernobyl wasn’t filmed entirely in Ukraine. In fact, the perfect locations were captured in different parts of Lithuania, but mostly Vilnius. The 30km exclusion zone near Chernobyl is a risky tourist destination – the surrounding area won’t be fit for human habitation for another 20,000 years – but Vilnius offers a safe adventure visiting the authentic HBO Chernobyl locations.
Awarded at Emmys
Chernobyl had an impressive showing at the 2019 Emmy Awards. The hit HBO miniseries won in 10 of the 19 awards it was nominated for, including the Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special awards. Chernobyl was also awarded for cinematography, single-camera production design, picture editing, music composition, sound editing, sound mixing, and visual special effects.
Interesting facts
The series took almost 1,000 hours to make, was shot in some 40 different locations, and had upwards of 5,000 people participated in the filming. Moreover, the Chernobyl miniseries is by far Lithuania’s biggest production to date.
Finding the perfect locations
Lithuania served as the perfect backdrop for the miniseries because of its common Soviet history with Ukraine and the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, which is now gradually being shut down. However, one of the main tasks was to transform the areas back into the Soviet era. ‘They have become a part of Europe, they have come a long long way and it was about going backwards and peeling things away,” the show’s creator Craig Mazin recounted to the press.
The massive, destroyed reactor sets were built in a local film studio, but most of the action takes place in the city: 60 of the 88 days were spent filming in Vilnius, recreating the lives of the people and the lies their government told them.
