Gonzaga Theatre and Cowboy Town: Where and how movies are filmed in Moscow
Moscow is the leader in Russian film production since 90 per cent of domestic films are shot here. In addition to its picturesque views and architectural landmarks, the city attracts with its wide range of filming opportunities.
The capital is running a large-scale project called Moscow as A Cinema City for filmmakers to have more than 1,170 hectares of creative space with elements of different eras to recreate events from the past or travel to the distant future. This is how themed pavilions are arranged at the largest venues in Moscow, such as Moskino Cinema Park and Maxim Gorky Film Studio on the historical site on Sergei Eisenstein Street and Ryazansky Prospekt (former VNIIMETMASH plant), which are all part of a world-class film cluster being created in Moscow.
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On Russian Cinema Day celebrated on August 27, we will tell you what filming opportunities are available in the capital and what the city's main film sites are all about.
Filming in one click
Today Moscow is certainly a city of cinema as it offers plenty of film settings, creating a good film-making environment.
Until recently, filming on its streets used to be nerve-racking, indeed, because all road closures, engagements in parks, squares or near historic buildings required special permits from the authorities, and, while waiting for approval, the filming process could be delayed. In order to simplify this stage, they forged the Moskino Film Committee in 2018 to help approve filming not only on the streets, but even in water areas.
And to help filmmakers prepare for work, the municipality also created the Moskino film platform (Moscow Digital Film Platform) in September 2023, which provides opportunities to rent a pavilion or a film set, choose an outdoor location and select costumes or props. Reservation is available in just a couple of clicks. Its database contains more than 80 filming pavilions and over 400 city streets, neighborhoods, parks, estates and museums, in addition to film captivating scenes that can take the viewer to different worlds or eras. Let us take a closer look at what the largest cinema centers in Moscow are all about.
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Russia’s oldest film studio
Established in back 1915, the Maxim Gorky Film Studio is one of the oldest in Russia, its golden collection including hundreds of iconic movies. However, like other state-owned filmmaking businesses, it did not escape decline in the 1990s and produced almost nothing for a long time. In 2019, they kicked off a large-scale project to revamp the studio and four years later it was transferred to the municipal ownership. In the future, it will be equipped with everything necessary for a full cycle of film production.
Work is currently in full swing at two film studio sites as they are renovating its old buildings and erecting some new premises, such as a costume and props center on Sergei Eisenstein Street that will store more than 200,000 apparel items and parts, or a production facility in Valdaisky Proezd with filming pavilions, virtual set studios, dressing rooms, etc.
With over 65 feature, documentary and popular science film projects released since 2019, today the film studio continues to produce films, its recent releases including comedies How I Met Her Mother and A Tour with Ivanushki, documentaries Hit First! about the trailblazing women's football team in Dagestan, and the gripping biopic Gorbacheva, a story of the first lady of the USSR, and popular science film series for schoolchildren Sci-Fi. September 12, they will release the drama Vera, a new screen adaptation of Galina Shcherbakova's story You’ve Never Dreamed of It, starring Viktoria Tolstoganova and featuring music by Alexei Rybnikov. The New Year blockbuster A Letter to Father Frost will hit the big screens at the end of 2025.
The studio also trains future film and media professionals, so in 2023 they launched a creative space, known as the Gorky Cinema Campus, for children and teenagers to take themed master classes, filmmaking career guide shifts and even international film expeditions to Serbia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Turkey, to name a few shooting destinations they visited over the year.
The biggest Costume Center and Museum of Cinematography
The continuation of the legendary Maxim Gorky Film Studio will be a site located at the former VNIIMETMASH plant on Ryazansky Prospekt where they started building a cinema center in 2023.
It will house filming pavilions, dressing rooms, a multimedia center, an XR pavilion with augmented reality technologies, and a Museum of Cinematography with Russia’s largest holding of working filming equipment of the 20th and 21st centuries. Not only film producers, but also city residents will be able to immerse themselves in the cinematic atmosphere of the museum and pavilions; in the future, the site will be open to wider public.
Today, it accommodates Europe’s largest costume and props center, The Firebird, offering more than a million historical costumes, rare items, and backdrop stuff, from an 18-century candelabrum to Soviet era home appliances. Its costumes and props can be seen, in particular, in The Heart of Parma, Matilda, Ice, The Bremen Town Musicians, and in the new film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, the holdings still expanding with items from everywhere on the Earth.
Work is also in full swing at other sites. Since 2023, they have filmed there 37 projects, including commercials, music videos, TV shows, and films, such as The Abrek, Aunt Marta — 2, The Last Warrior. The Heritage, etc.
An airport, a train station and streets of Berlin: Moskino Cinema Park
Another large cinema centre, the Moskino Cinema Park, is emerging in the Krasnopakhorsky district in Troitsk to eventually grow into the world's largest outdoor filming location. The authorities decided to create the park in 2019, and today it has got its first buildings with 18 filming locations to make almost any idea a reality, including sets of a train station, an airport, a remote village, a county town, Moscow in the 1940s, streets of Berlin, the Gonzaga Theater and the Cathedral Square of the Russian capital, one of the sites featuring a cowboy town with typical houses, fences and sand instead of grass and asphalt. The Moskino Cinema Park also boasts Europe’s largest chroma key and a real-world Tu-154 airplane.
Creating projects has become faster and easier, because the journey from one filming location to another now takes no more than seven minutes. Moreover, all the sites have parking and capabilities to connect large equipment, such as lighting fixtures.
When they are not busy with filming, the Moskino Cinema Park offers group tours to provide insight into film production processes, the history of the film park itself and its projects. Adults are invited to immerse themselves in the world of cinema at a master class in plastic make-up, while children can enjoy the Camera! Action walking tour, and fans of behind-the-scenes life will love certainly the Cinema Expedition tour.
More than 40 projects have been filmed there to date, including the spy drama GDR, documentary In Our Yard…, TV series At the Call of the Heart, Knock on My Door in Moscow, to name a few.
Projects that are filmed at the Moscow film cluster, such as The Challenge by Klim Shipenko, The Master and Margarita by Vladimir Bortko, etc., can be watched in the citywide Moskino cinema chain.
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