Award winning Apple TV+ drama shooting in Cambridge

An award winning dramatic television series that has drawn international acclaim is in Cambridge this week to shoot scenes for its second season. 

Pachinko is filming at the old Dominion Woollens/Silknit textile factory on Queen Street, transforming the interior into a Second World War-era Korean munitions building. 

“They are only using the interior of the building for their set,” said Bryan Dykstra, partner for Blacks Point Developments. “The property is a great example of a turn of the 20th century industrial mill and was selected as few remain in Ontario.”

Pachinko is based off of the New York Times bestselling book of the same name and is described as, “a sweeping saga that chronicles the hopes and dreams of a Korean immigrant family across four generations as they leave their homeland in an indomitable quest to survive and thrive,” according to the Internet Movie Database. 

“We were looking at reference material from 1940s Nagasaki and we felt the building fit perfectly for the layout and the geography for what we were going for,” said Mureen O'Donnell, publicist for Sliding Pin Productions.

“Filming will go one for a few more days in the city.”

The Korean drama starts in the early 1900s in Japanese occupied Korea and follows Kim Sunja, played by Oscar winning actress Youn Yuh-jung, as she recounts her life and her family's history escaping poverty in a war-torn region.

The show currently has a 97 per cent rating on popular tv and movie reviewing site Rotten Tomatoes. 

O'Donnell said the City of Cambridge has been one of the most cooperative municipalities in helping to get the permits to set up for filming and has made a name for itself with bringing titles like The Handmaids Tale and The Queen's Gambit to life. 

Season one of Pachinko is streaming exclusively on Apple TV+.