This is not the first time that the wonderful castle complex has surprised the film world. In recent years, the more than 200-year-old castle has slowly seen more Oscar- and other award-winning creators than Hollywood.
Stranger Things , Shawn Levy, as executive producer and director of ten episodes, instead of the usual science fiction and adventure themes, this time adapted Anthony Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Invisible Light
The film, shot in 2022, tells the story of a blind girl and her father. According to the story, a father and daughter flee from the Nazis in France during the Second World War, hiding a rare diamond.
The main roles are played by the talented Aria Mia Loberti and Mark Ruffalo, whose performances - based on the preview of the film - are guaranteed to deeply touch the hearts of the viewers.
In this special preview, we can recognize a location that played a major role during the filming. This location is none other than the two-hundred-year-old Zichy Castle in Soponya, surrounded by a protected English park.
The building has a long and rich history, as it was originally built in 1757 as an L-shaped baroque mansion on the order of Count János Zichy. Over the centuries, it was rebuilt and transformed several times, first following the work of Mihály Pollack between 1772-1773, and then again in 1807 with an expansion, gaining its present-day classicist image. Inside the castle, you can still see the "imprints" of the children's home that operated here at the dawn of the Kádár era. The building complex, which is currently under the management of the Magyar Nemzeti Vagyonkeszela Zrt., but has been abandoned since its closure in 1998, has now been given the opportunity to shine its splendor and historical charm on the screen as a film background in the production.
The miniseries is expected to be broadcast by Netflix at the beginning of November.
But it is not only in connection with the new miniseries that the role of the Soponya castle in the film world is worth mentioning. Showtime also discovered the magical potential of the country. After the success of the previous Tudors This time the story of the Borgias was filmed with the same title, where the XV. in Italy in the 19th century, one of the most decisive and legendary families of the flourishing Renaissance stood.
In the series, Rodrigo Borgia, i.e. VI. Sándor is the center, played by Oscar winner Jeremy Irons. Borgia is an ambitious and cunning man who craves power and influence and will use any means to achieve his goals. However, his rise to the head of the church is full of corrupt and immoral actions that drag his family into the shadows with them. The Borgias series was created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Neil Jordan, who previously worked on the Tudors series alongside Michael Hirst as screenwriter and executive producer. A year earlier, the imposing building served as a film backdrop for a Hungarian production.
In 2021, Károly Eperjes made a full-length film on a location that had also seen better days, the title of which Christ's shirt . The film takes the viewer back to the 1950s, to the times when the State Protection Authority of the communist dictatorship in Hungary - ÁVH - launched brutal and merciless attacks against monastic orders and church communities, targeting Christianity and its institutions.
It is also worth looking at the works filmed here in terms of the number of ways in which the film world is able to endow the same location or building with several faces, just like the actors. It is hoped that the monument building, which has been empty for almost 30 years and is worth much more, will receive a worthy treatment in the future, and will be so attractive to film producers because of its undiminished condition.
