Here's where Sacrifice was filmed: from Santorini's active volcano to the Prohodna Cave in Bulgaria
Sacrifice
Every morning, the cast and crew climbed a volcano. The hike took almost an hour. Chris Evans and Anya Taylor-Joy at the top, looking out across the Aegean, waiting for Romain Gavras to call action. "You're just looking around at the majesty of the world," Evans told Variety. "It's easy to completely lose yourself, as you would if there weren't a film crew capturing your every move."
Sacrifice was filmed entirely on location in Greece, Bulgaria, and Iceland. Ten weeks in the bowels of caves and caverns and atop volcanoes. No backlots. No studio approximations of ancient landscapes. Gavras, whose previous film Athena opened with one of the most celebrated single-shot sequences in recent cinema, made the same demand of his debut English-language feature: the locations must be real, and the cast must inhabit them physically. "We had to bring 200 extras in gala dresses to a mine in Northern Greece with all the A-list cast actors," Gavras said. "It's more fun as a director to bring the cast on a real active volcano, when actors are down to do stuff like that. Every morning, we had to climb up for almost an hour, with all the gear on donkeys, everyone walking up. You get performances that are amazing."
Principal photography took place between November and December 2024.
Evans and Taylor-Joy began most filming days by hiking up the side of Santorini's active volcano — the caldera that is the collapsed remnant of one of the most violent eruptions in recorded history, dating to around 1600 BCE. Taylor-Joy described to Netflix what the physical experience gave her: "It put me in a better place. Spending all that time outdoors gives me a lot of peace. To know my scale, to be around landscapes that have been there for a long time before me and will be there a long time after me, that just relaxes me."
A marble quarry in Volakas in northern Greece hosted the film's largest and most visually absurd set piece. Volakas is one of Greece's most important quarrying centres, its open-pit mines carved into the mountainside in terraced white walls that photograph as simultaneously industrial and ancient. Gavras brought 200 extras in gala dresses to the mine alongside the full A-list cast.
Studio and location work took place in Athens and Lavrio — including production space at Pireos 260, home of the Athens Epidaurus Festival.
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In late 2024, Taylor-Joy was spotted several times in Bulgaria during filming — later posting photographs from the set and describing the experience as "pure magic." A photo by a crew member suggests some scenes took place near Bulgaria's iconic Prohodna Cave, known locally as "God's Eyes," situated near the village of Karlukovo in the Lovech region. The cave — whose two enormous eye-shaped openings in the vaulted ceiling let in dramatic shafts of light — is one of Bulgaria's most visually extraordinary natural formations.
Iceland completed the location triangle — its lava fields and geothermal landscapes extending the film's volcanic visual vocabulary into the North Atlantic. Additional landscape and exterior photography took place here.
Sacrifice had its world premiere at TIFF on September 6, 2025, and arrives on Netflix on October 16, 2026.
SOURCE
Netflix.com // Greek City Times // TalentVision Bulgaria // IMDb
CREDITS
© Netflix, Gucci Productions, Never Sleep Pictures
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