On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Sirāt.

Spanish filmmaker Óliver Laxe first imagined Sirāt as a singular vision in 2011. “I started with this idea of making a film in the desert with trucks driving fast through the sand,” he says. “I always start with images.”

At the time, Laxe was living in Morocco, a country to which he felt a deep connection. That became the ideal location for the film, about a father (Sergi López) who is searching for his missing daughter at a remote rave along with his young son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog. The family soon joins a group of ravers in a journey across the Sahara Desert, where surreal tragedy after surreal tragedy befalls them.

Laxe and his crew ultimately shot the film, which is nominated for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars, in Spain and Morocco, from May through July 2024—a particularly hot time to be in the desert. “Art is about going through the limit,” Laxe says. “That’s how I do my job. It has to be difficult to achieve beauty. In a tree, the good fruit are never in reach of your hand. You have to climb the tree and it’s risky to climb the tree, but you will have very good views from the top.”

Because Laxe had lived in Morocco for over a decade, he was familiar with the landscapes and languages. He found many of the locations himself, both in person and using Google Maps. The story shifts between the Sahara and the Atlas Mountains that border it to the north.

“These two spaces are perfect for Sirāt because in the mountains are a place for existentialism,” Laxe explains. “You ask yourself how small you are, about your mission in life. I mean, And the response to that existentialism is to surrender. The desert is a place for surrendering.”

For Laxe, making a film set in a specific place is a way of giving back. He’s against tourism for the sake of tourism and instead encourages people to seek out the locations from Sirāt as interested travelers. “It can’t just be about consuming places for Instagram,” he says. “That’s why I make films—to balance this craziness. When I’m shooting in these places I spend time there with the people.”

As to be expected with any show within the Game of Thrones universe, the locations have been a highlight for viewers tuning in week after week. So where was A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms filmed? Here, we take a peek behind the scenes to reveal some of the key locations to look out for.

Where was A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms filmed?

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was filmed across Northern Ireland. While viewers experience breathtaking scenery through their screens, it threw up a host of issues for the cast and crew. “It’s very, very rainy, and the sets were so muddy”, says Dexter Sol Ansell, who plays Egg—“If you stepped in the mud and stood still for more than five seconds, you’re gone. You’ve been submerged.”

Glenarm Castle Estate

“They did the whole Ashford Meadow camp out in Glenarm”, says Peter Claffey, who plays Ser Duncan the Tall. “Yes, the weather is challenging, but it’s all completely negated by the crew that you work with… it was hard and it was long hours but you come into work and everything’s made so much easier by the fact that everybody’s got a smile on their face.”

Glenarm Castle Estate is the ancestral home of the MacDonnell (or McDonnell) family, who have been in the area since the late 14th Century. The website states: “Glenarm Castle was built on its present site by Sorley Boy’s son, Randal MacDonnell, 1st Earl of Antrim in 1636. However, only six years later, in 1642, the house was burned by a Scots Covenanter army who were attacking the royalist MacDonnells and so it remained a roofless ruin for over a hundred years.”

Dunk is determined to prove his metal as a knight

HBO

Hen Mountain and Leitrim Lodge

These locations stood in for shots of The Reach—a fertile region in southern Westeros where much of the action takes place. Experience the cinematic scenery for yourself by parking up at Hen Mountain Car Park and setting off on foot for a walk that takes between one hour and 90 minutes. For the ultimate leg-stretch, take a 10-minute drive from here to Leitrim Lodge Car Park and set off on foot again.

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Sentimental Value.

Oslo, Norway’s capital and most populous city by a wide margin, is not a destination that’s necessarily on the tip of most travelers’ tongues. But the place is becoming a bit of a movie star thanks to the Norwegian director Joachim Trier. The daily life of ordinary people—in the city’s parks and bookstores and at parties—takes center stage in his slice-of-life cinema (The Worst Person in the World and Oslo, August 31 were among his early indie hits) and leave one swooning for a life there with all of the melancholy and joy that it might contain. Trier’s latest film, Sentimental Value, is no different in its setting nor its wistful depiction of it.

When asked about Oslo, Trier tells Condé Nast Traveler, “Yes, you want me to talk about the city that, when I grew up in it, no one cared about. And slowly, it’s become bigger, and I’m grateful if I in any way contributed to showing its nicer aspects, which I think happens automatically when you create human stories that people identify with and put characters in these places where you’ve had your own emotional experiences. It’s a big and small city at the same time—not as elegant as Stockholm, or as culturally vibrant as Copenhagen. Oslo is more discreet.”

When first asked to extrapolate on Oslo’s graces, Trier says, “In the summer, it’s really hot because of the Gulf Stream, and it’s one of the few capitals in Europe where you can swim in the fjord. And in the winter, it’s really snowing and we have real ski slopes just outside of the city center. You have these tremendous seasonal changes that create this gratitude for spring arriving.” Through the success of his directorial career, Trier still DJs in different parks around the city in the summer. Of the first show each year, he says, “Everyone’s super pale, but they’re still running around in their shorts and t-shirts, celebrating summer arriving. It’s charming and weird.”

Sentimental Value follows a family—estranged filmmaker father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who hold him in varying degrees of contempt—in the wake of the mother’s death. Below, Trier and production designer (and fellow Norwegian) Jørgen Stangebye Larsen take us behind the scenes of Oslo as depicted in Sentimental Value, which is currently nominated for nine Academy Awards including Best Picture and is available in theaters and on streaming.

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at The Secret Agent.

If you only saw a few sun-streaked stills from Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new film “Secret Agent”, set largely in the Northeastern Brazilian city of Recife—during a confetti-covered week of Carnival, in 1977 no less—it might seem like a charming opportunity for escapism. In reality, the political thriller follows a man desperately plotting his own escape from the threats of Brazil’s two-decades-long military dictatorship, the tentacles of which have wrapped themselves around every element of daily life. Here, the joyous and the boisterous contrast the dark and insidious, allowing viewers to both be delighted by colorful street scenes and celebrations while the rot of fear creeps in, as the details surrounding our main character (Wagner Moura) and his predicament are revealed.

For Mendonça, the film was a chance to return to his hometown of Recife, and paint a portrait of a city full of contrasts, using everything from historic movie theaters to popular waterfront parks in the sultry hours after sunset to tell a story that has already garnered four Oscar nods. To get a sense of how Mendonça time-traveled through Brazil past and present, while drawing on references very close to home, we hopped on the phone with the director himself. Below, he walked us through the very real places that shaped the film and its unmistakable visual identity.

First things first: Was the film shot entirely on location in Recife, Brazil?

We shot 90% in Recife, which is where I come from, and so I know the city very well. It’s a strong character for a film. I even wrote the scenes to be shot very specifically in locations that I know by heart.

We also traveled to Brasilia, and we did two days in São Paulo because I wanted the locations to be very specific. Of course in cinema, you can always shoot in some back street and call it São Paulo, but I really wanted to show the difference in the style of the three cities, even if they only appeared briefly in the film.

And then when Armando talks to his lawyer in Brasilia, I wanted to actually have a moment where the lawyer goes downstairs and finds a payphone, and you can tell that it’s Brasilia because of the architecture. We found a wonderful location right at what they call the commercial sector in Brasilia, which was mostly built in the late ‘60s and early ’70s. And there was a very particular shot with the postman, who’s bringing the telegram, and that was very specifically Brasilia.

The Lake District isn’t in the original story. Having lived there yourself, did you already know that you wanted to shoot part of the film there?

When we were expanding the story, Ben [Shattuck] and I, originally, he wrote a sequence that was set in the Alps, where Lionel gets lost in a blizzard. But of course, the producers were like, “We cannot afford for him to get lost in the Alps.” So we decided that we wanted to put him somewhere that Ben and I had both either been to or had some memory of. We had both briefly lived in the Lake District at different times in our lives, and that became the perfect place.

I remember our production designer went on Google Earth from New York City. She wanted to find the most remote house that she could find in the Lake District. She found this stone cottage that was on the top of a mountain overlooking one of the lakes. And she was like, “We have to shoot it here.” We were immediately told that it is virtually impossible to get there, because it’s literally up a horrendously treacherous ravine, but we just persevered. It was one of the most exhausting days of shooting because every single person had to be taken up in a 4×4 in small groups, with all the gear. But you get onto this mountain, and you see this view. It was a no-brainer. It was only one day of shooting, but it was a major operation. But if you’re going to go all the way to England, to the Lake District, you might as well do it properly.

What was your experience like in the Lake District?

When I lived there, I was an apprentice photographer, learning how to frame photographs. I would run a lot—you could run into the hills. There were a lot of sheep. I was very young. It was the first time I’d ever been to England. I just graduated from university and it was just beautiful and empty and desolate and dramatic. And it was a really formative experience. And I’m very glad that I got to go back and photograph it as a film.

I don’t think Paul had ever been there before we shot those scenes. We actually finished the film there. That was our last shoot, so we had a mini rap party on a jetty into one of those lakes. I had brought my JBL speaker onto the jetty and we were just all on this jetty, dancing and drinking. And then at some point, somebody just knocked the JBL into the lake, and you just heard the music sink… It was a very lovely, hilarious party on a very narrow jetty that none of us will ever forget.

Where else in Europe did you shoot?

We were in Italy for a week in the town of Tarquinia, just outside of Rome. We had pretty much taken over this town. We had a lot of control there to be able to shoot in the square and recreate 1920s Italy. There was a lot of set dressing. That was also lovely. It was the beginning of summer, so it felt like we were on an Italian vacation. It’s also like it’s close enough to Rome to be accessible. Josh O’Connor had shot La Chimera in the same town, so that was how we came to know it as well. And it’s amazing how two different films were shot in the exact same town, but La Chimera is a different period and a totally different feeling.

On Location peels back the curtain on some of your favorite films, television shows, and more. This time, we take a look at Natchez.

A corseted woman standing on the porch of a grand antebellum home lifts her hoop skirt to reveal white tennis sneakers beneath. A pickup truck drives down Main Street with a man playing the steam organ perched happily in the back. These are not dream images, or ghosts, but vignettes from Natchez, a new documentary about the Mississippi town of the same name and the tourism industry therein.

Natchez has attracted tourists to its primo position on the Mississippi River ever since the boll-weevil knocked out its cotton crop. That was in the 1930s, less than a century after the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction transformed the South’s enslaved laborers into sharecroppers. Today, visitors come for river cruises, the local garden clubs, which organizes pilgrimages in the fall and spring, and historic home tours powered by an antebellum tourism industry. It’s not dissimilar from, say, Colonial Williamsburg—a sort of living history LARP that can at times feel like a revisionist fairy tale.

Natchez, a new documentary about antebellum tourism in the town of the same name, depicts the tourism industry and its reckoning with—and, at times, lack thereof—the facts of American slavery, and how they have been omitted from house tours and other tourism experiences. Tracy “Rev” Collins, a reverend who leads local tours centering the stories of Black people, describes the situation in Natchez as follows: “It turns out that Millennials and Generation Z folks are not as interested in the antebellum story, the Gone With the Wind story, as the baby boomers are… Which is where I come in. I’m about to violate some Southern pride narratives with truths and facts.”

These words come about a half hour into Natchez, which is directed by Suzannah Herbert. While planning a road trip from Memphis to New Orleans with her mother, Herbert received a flood of recommendations from friends to visit Natchez. When she did so, Herbert felt tension between the surreal beauty of the place—rustling green willows, the historic homes preserved like dollhouses—and a sense of denial and confusion about a violent history. Herbert says, “I saw a community grappling with these questions of who gets to tell the country’s history. It’s a microcosm of the country as a whole.”

Pizzini’s background in interior design came in handy when it came to crafting the look of Carol’s home. According to Pizzini: “I started when the Santa Fe style was really at its height, and I just kind of dug into some of that but modernized it. I didn’t do a late ‘80s Santa Fe because it’s very different, but I was very familiar with that type of architecture and design.”

In addition to its star billing, Albuquerque also sneaks into a few supporting roles. Another storyline in the show follows survivor Manousos Oviedo who manages a self-storage facility in Paraguay. His office and storage unit were built in Albuquerque. On a long hike to New Mexico, Manousos passes through the treacherous Darién Gap: “We had to bring in a ton of greens and manufactured a ton of styrofoam rocks and other scenery, so we created parts of the jungle for the Darién Gap in Albuquerque. That way, we were allowed to burn a car and hack at the vegetation because we can’t touch the vegetation and stuff in Cubo de La Galga,” where many of the rainforest scenes were filmed. “The advantage was, I had scouted this place way before we were getting ready to shoot, so, I had all these photographs that we could match the rocks, the plants, everything, for our little pieces of the Gap in Albuquerque, and then we could shoot all the wides in La Palma,” says Pizzini.

In a flashback sequence when Carol and her manager/partner Helen visit a Norwegian ice hotel, the crew recreated the Arctic surroundings completely in Albuquerque. “We use lots of references for settings like the ice hotel, which we had these amazing sculptors carve, and we did a lot of research on how that whole process works, and how they come up with these ideas, with ice hotels, they always start from scratch and hire artists to come in and create these rooms.”

With other sets such as the Peruvian village constructed in nearby Pecos, New Mexico, just north of Santa Fe, filming “across continents” was as simple as driving up and down a few streets: “We could shoot the Peruvian Village, and then the next day, go to the Darién Gap, and that worked out really well.”

Bilbao

When Carol requests a conference of the immune, the group gathers in the hollowed-out halls of Bilbao Airport (BIO). Reflecting on the importance of the scene, Pizzini says, “The Bilbao Airport was a big deal—that was an anchor for us to start. We ended up shooting at another Santiago Calatrava building, who was the architect who did the Bilbao Airport, and we clearly couldn’t shoot in the Bilbao Airport. We shot the exterior, but we couldn’t shoot inside, so we ended up finding this place in Oviedo, Spain.” The former congressional building was transformed into the interior of the airport overnight. “We were able to get in there and turn that into our Bilbao Airport. But we only had 24 hours to do it, so we had to bring in all the seating and make the signs exactly like they have at the Bilbao Airport. It worked out great, because it was completely empty, and we owned it. That was the challenge of shooting the show—these places have to be empty.”

“The big thing about shooting in Louisiana was all of the tropical plants,” he notes. “There’s palm trees everywhere and weird trees that are not in Boston, so we removed the trees in post-production.”

Linfield was also shot in Louisiana. Alex’s grandmother’s house, which he inherits, was in the Garden District. The only thing that’s given the location away is the sidewalks. “New Orleans sidewalks are notoriously in bad shape,” Haley says. “All the New Orleans natives see it and they go, ‘That’s New Orleans because of how crazy the sidewalks are.’ But it’s great when Poppy runs after Alex because it’s one last big hurdle for her. Emily ran so hard on those two days that she pulled a muscle.”

Barcelona, Spain

One of the biggest changes from the book was moving the wedding of Alex’s brother David (Miles Heizer) from Palm Springs to Barcelona. Haley says it’s almost impossible to film in Palm Springs due to cost, so they decided to stage the summer nuptials in the Spanish city instead. “It added a certain European destination vibe that made the scope of the film feel bigger,” Haley says.

The rehearsal dinner was filmed in the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, with flowers and parasols for extra décor, while the wedding itself took place at Santa Clotilde, a private villa with public gardens. The rooftop of the ME Barcelona also made an appearance early in the film. Although some soundstages were used, the Airbnb Poppy rents in the city was a real home. The team added orange paint and built scaffolding and plastic sheeting around the balcony.

“We had the rain machine outside, but I needed privacy for Tom and Emily,” Haley says. “It was such an intimate scene out in the rain. We found some really cool locations, but they were too public. This home was a really great find. The exterior of her Airbnb was a different location that was on a beautiful street in Barcelona.”

For the airport scenes, the team cleaned and dressed up the now-shuttered old New Orleans airport, which was also used to film Carry On. “We made it look like a few different airports,” Haley notes. “It made life so much easier because when you shoot an active airport there’s a whole security thing and it takes forever to get in and out.”

Squamish, British Columbia

Recreating British Columbia in Spain for Alex and Poppy’s first vacation together was a particular challenge. The filmmakers ended up finding a village and forested area called Espinelves. “It’s so small that we had to be so smart about where the camera was and what trees we could see,” Haley says. “It’s basically a little nature park. Bruce did incredible work with the design and put in RVs and tents. He added more trees so that we could block certain things.”