STUDIO KIMMO
Films & Projects by
Nina Spiering & Mirka Duijn
Nina Spiering & Mirka Duijn
PHOTO BY PIM TOP
Studio Kimmo
Studio Kimmo, with its bases in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Gothenburg, Sweden, embodies the creative partnership of filmmakers Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering.
Selected awards:
International Digital EMMY® Award, 2015
Peabody Award, 2019
Prix Europe, 2014
Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering have a history of creating documentary, fiction, and experimental film projects, as well as journalistic productions such as The Industry and Last Hijack Interactive. Their projects always start with in-depth research, delving deeply into their chosen subjects. They have a particular interest in the mediation of place and identity.
The duo often works with archives and archival material, renegotiating historical narratives. Their most recent project, Shangri-La, Paradise under Construction, premiered at IDFA 2022 and competed for Best Dutch Film. Currently, they are working on Paradise Pt II, an ‘ABC about romantic clichés about nature’, questioning how the romantic-gaze on nature influenced human relations with their environment.
Download the Studio Kimmo portfolio/CV pdf (2023).
Studio Kimmo, with its bases in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Gothenburg, Sweden, embodies the creative partnership of filmmakers Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering.
Selected awards:
International Digital EMMY® Award, 2015
Peabody Award, 2019
Prix Europe, 2014
Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering have a history of creating documentary, fiction, and experimental film projects, as well as journalistic productions such as The Industry and Last Hijack Interactive. Their projects always start with in-depth research, delving deeply into their chosen subjects. They have a particular interest in the mediation of place and identity.
The duo often works with archives and archival material, renegotiating historical narratives. Their most recent project, Shangri-La, Paradise under Construction, premiered at IDFA 2022 and competed for Best Dutch Film. Currently, they are working on Paradise Pt II, an ‘ABC about romantic clichés about nature’, questioning how the romantic-gaze on nature influenced human relations with their environment.
Download the Studio Kimmo portfolio/CV pdf (2023).
The history of Studio Kimmo
Mirka began her career in 2003 at VPRO Digital, where she explored experimental interactive and transmedia storytelling across web and TV projects. By 2008, she shifted her focus entirely to writing and directing for film and media. Her earlier work often revolved around the evolving relationship between technology and storytelling, leading to interactive and immersive projects such as Last Hijack Interactive (Digital EMMY Award, 2014) and The Industry (Peabody Award, 2019).
Nina graduated from the University of the Arts in Utrecht in 2007 with a background in spatial design and video for theatre. She worked with leading Dutch theatre companies like Orkater and Oostpool before transitioning to film. Her early training in 3D space continues to shape her approach as both a director and production designer.
Their collaboration began in 2004, focusing on fiction and documentary filmmaking while also working in interactive documentary, expanded cinema, and immersive storytelling for film, television, and museum contexts. Their projects seek to challenge conventional narratives, experimenting with form and perspective to engage audiences in new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Until recently Mirka Duijn was a Senior Lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand in Göteborg, where she taught in the MFA Film program. Nina Spiering is a lecturer in film at the University of the Arts in Utrecht.
The Stories we Tell
We, humans, tell stories to understand the world. Storytelling is a way of structuring a chaos consisting of events, feelings, memories into an understandable, agreeable whole, consciously or unconsciously incorporating certain impressions, while leaving out others. The question is: How does one get from a set of experiences to a narrative? How does one shape the process from the first encounter, through the organisation of one's impressions, to a final story that does justice to the experienced reality? This question is at the core of all of our projects, not only for ourselves as makers, but in general in society: What narratives do people create to cope with reality?
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias grace (1996)
Mirka began her career in 2003 at VPRO Digital, where she explored experimental interactive and transmedia storytelling across web and TV projects. By 2008, she shifted her focus entirely to writing and directing for film and media. Her earlier work often revolved around the evolving relationship between technology and storytelling, leading to interactive and immersive projects such as Last Hijack Interactive (Digital EMMY Award, 2014) and The Industry (Peabody Award, 2019).
Nina graduated from the University of the Arts in Utrecht in 2007 with a background in spatial design and video for theatre. She worked with leading Dutch theatre companies like Orkater and Oostpool before transitioning to film. Her early training in 3D space continues to shape her approach as both a director and production designer.
Their collaboration began in 2004, focusing on fiction and documentary filmmaking while also working in interactive documentary, expanded cinema, and immersive storytelling for film, television, and museum contexts. Their projects seek to challenge conventional narratives, experimenting with form and perspective to engage audiences in new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
Until recently Mirka Duijn was a Senior Lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand in Göteborg, where she taught in the MFA Film program. Nina Spiering is a lecturer in film at the University of the Arts in Utrecht.
The Stories we Tell
We, humans, tell stories to understand the world. Storytelling is a way of structuring a chaos consisting of events, feelings, memories into an understandable, agreeable whole, consciously or unconsciously incorporating certain impressions, while leaving out others. The question is: How does one get from a set of experiences to a narrative? How does one shape the process from the first encounter, through the organisation of one's impressions, to a final story that does justice to the experienced reality? This question is at the core of all of our projects, not only for ourselves as makers, but in general in society: What narratives do people create to cope with reality?
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias grace (1996)
Cargo Collective, Inc. Los Angeles, Calif.
Paradise Pt. II
Project under Development, 2024-2028
Paradise Pt II: Reimagining Nature Through Documentary Landscapes
Paradise Pt II is an ongoing research project with multiple outcomes amongst which are filmic installations, short films, a documentary film and a pedagogical strand.
Paradise Pt II explores how romantic and idyllic representations of nature have shaped Western perceptions and interactions with natural environments. This project investigates how such imagery, rooted in modernity and reinforced through visual culture, continues to influence our environmental consciousness by presenting nature as something separate from humanity, an object of beauty and a resource for consumption. As environmental challenges become increasingly pressing, re-examining these visual traditions takes on increased significance. As documentary makers, we aim to critically engage with these visual traditions to challenge their inherited meanings and reframe them in ways that inspire alternative narratives. Through a series of concrete case studies, Paradise Pt II will explore the genealogy of romantic clichés and their impact, with the goal of subverting their allure and fostering more responsible, reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
A key idea in this research is the garden - and the notion of paradise - as a contested space. It is shaped by exclusion and control, but it also holds space for utopian dreams and alternative ways of imagining the world. This way of thinking connects to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which describes the garden as a place that mirrors, reshapes, and questions wider cultural and natural landscapes. Within this analogy, the documentary filmmaker becomes a gardener, curating and assembling imagery of nature to nurture new perspectives on natural environments.
Work that is part of Paradise Pt.II:
We Looked and Called it Nature - Five-screen video installation, 2025 (22 minutes)
This work explores how ideas of beauty shape ways of looking at nature. Filmed in the botanical garden in Gothenburg, the work moves between the perspectives of gardeners, children, scientists, and the artists, as the makers attempt to shed a romantic lens on the landscape, and repeatedly encounter its persistence. Rather than rejecting beauty, the installation becomes an exploration of how beauty might be reconsidered and used differently once its innocence can no longer be assumed.
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Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
Paradise Pt II / How to Grow an Image - Short film, 2025 (12 minutes)
How to Grow an Image is an archival essay film that traces how idealised images of nature have been historically produced and sustained. Working with archival material and contemporary footage, the film follows specific plant species through histories of cultivation, classification, and display, showing how images of ‘nature' are shaped by intertwined relations of care, control, and power. Developed as part of Paradise Pt II, the work tests how familiar visual tropes might be reworked to invite more critical and attentive ways of looking.
![]()
Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
It’s alive, ALIVE! - 16-screen video installation, 2025
It’s alive, ALIVE! (2025) is a looped installation that brings together fragments of idealised nature drawn from recent visual culture. Inspired by Frankenstein, the work assembles a hybrid, slightly uncanny landscape from glossy decorative mirrors, advertising imagery, Instagram vistas, and the artists’ own footage. By blurring documentation and fabrication, the installation reflects on how images of “the natural” begin to live lives of their own - circulating, mutating, and shaping our relationship to nature beyond the control of their makers.
![]()
Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
Paradise Again - Feature documentary, 2027 - 2028
Paradise Again is a documentary in development that explores how romantic images of nature - especially gardens - have shaped the way we see, desire, and treat the natural world. Moving between historical archives, contemporary gardens, and personal observations, the film reveals the garden as both a site of control and exclusion and a space for care, imagination, and future-making. By tracing how ideas of ‘paradise’ have been constructed and repeated over time, the film invites viewers to look again at the seductive images of nature that surround us, and to consider how we might cultivate different, more attentive relationships with our environment.
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Still from Paradise Pt II, Mirka Duijn, 2025.
General interest
In the quest to make sense of their environment, humans rely on narratives, stories and myths that they tell themselves and others. But the narratives that are shaped around our relation to nature are heavily influenced by the natural colonial-gaze, a lens through which nature has often been perceived as a realm to be dominated and controlled.
Throughout history, narratives have shaped our perception of nature as an external, pristine entity, fostering an idealized escape from the complexities of human existence. However, this idealized portrayal has hindered our capacity to foster a holistic and sustainable rapport with the environment, resulting in a disconnect between our constructed stories and the complex realities they represent.
Despite the growing awareness of the need for a paradigm shift in our narrative approach to nature, we continue to struggle in reconciling the preconceived notions of the romanticized and enlightened views of nature. This tension between the constructed narrative and the authentic reality of our environmental challenges has led to a profound disconnect, perpetuating the colonial proposition that nature exists solely for our exploitation and benefit.
![]()
Telephone poles disguised as trees in Utah.
In exploring the contemporary landscape and tracing the historical trajectory of humanity's portrayal of nature, it becomes evident that the roots of this dissonance can be found in the flawed narratives that have long dominated our understanding of the natural world.
Paradise Pt II project will exist out of a mosaic of case studies around this proposition. We are working with cases where there is a tension between the narrative that is created and the underlying represented reality. We will both focus on the present day, as well as tracing back history of the image of nature, asking ourselves the question: where and how did it go wrong, and with what consequences?
![]()
The first sequoia tree that was transported to a world fair in England, after being ‘discovered’ in California by Western settlers. The bark was stripped off the original tree, transported and assembled at the fair. The tree was assembled so poorly, that visitors thought the it was a fake, a hoax, and for several years the discovery was not taken seriously at all.
Paradise Pt II is an ongoing research project with multiple outcomes amongst which are filmic installations, short films, a documentary film and a pedagogical strand.
Paradise Pt II explores how romantic and idyllic representations of nature have shaped Western perceptions and interactions with natural environments. This project investigates how such imagery, rooted in modernity and reinforced through visual culture, continues to influence our environmental consciousness by presenting nature as something separate from humanity, an object of beauty and a resource for consumption. As environmental challenges become increasingly pressing, re-examining these visual traditions takes on increased significance. As documentary makers, we aim to critically engage with these visual traditions to challenge their inherited meanings and reframe them in ways that inspire alternative narratives. Through a series of concrete case studies, Paradise Pt II will explore the genealogy of romantic clichés and their impact, with the goal of subverting their allure and fostering more responsible, reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
A key idea in this research is the garden - and the notion of paradise - as a contested space. It is shaped by exclusion and control, but it also holds space for utopian dreams and alternative ways of imagining the world. This way of thinking connects to Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which describes the garden as a place that mirrors, reshapes, and questions wider cultural and natural landscapes. Within this analogy, the documentary filmmaker becomes a gardener, curating and assembling imagery of nature to nurture new perspectives on natural environments.
Work that is part of Paradise Pt.II:
We Looked and Called it Nature - Five-screen video installation, 2025 (22 minutes)
This work explores how ideas of beauty shape ways of looking at nature. Filmed in the botanical garden in Gothenburg, the work moves between the perspectives of gardeners, children, scientists, and the artists, as the makers attempt to shed a romantic lens on the landscape, and repeatedly encounter its persistence. Rather than rejecting beauty, the installation becomes an exploration of how beauty might be reconsidered and used differently once its innocence can no longer be assumed.
Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
Paradise Pt II / How to Grow an Image - Short film, 2025 (12 minutes)
How to Grow an Image is an archival essay film that traces how idealised images of nature have been historically produced and sustained. Working with archival material and contemporary footage, the film follows specific plant species through histories of cultivation, classification, and display, showing how images of ‘nature' are shaped by intertwined relations of care, control, and power. Developed as part of Paradise Pt II, the work tests how familiar visual tropes might be reworked to invite more critical and attentive ways of looking.
Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
It’s alive, ALIVE! - 16-screen video installation, 2025
It’s alive, ALIVE! (2025) is a looped installation that brings together fragments of idealised nature drawn from recent visual culture. Inspired by Frankenstein, the work assembles a hybrid, slightly uncanny landscape from glossy decorative mirrors, advertising imagery, Instagram vistas, and the artists’ own footage. By blurring documentation and fabrication, the installation reflects on how images of “the natural” begin to live lives of their own - circulating, mutating, and shaping our relationship to nature beyond the control of their makers.
Photo taken at Röda Sten Konsthall by Andrej Lamut.
Paradise Again - Feature documentary, 2027 - 2028
Paradise Again is a documentary in development that explores how romantic images of nature - especially gardens - have shaped the way we see, desire, and treat the natural world. Moving between historical archives, contemporary gardens, and personal observations, the film reveals the garden as both a site of control and exclusion and a space for care, imagination, and future-making. By tracing how ideas of ‘paradise’ have been constructed and repeated over time, the film invites viewers to look again at the seductive images of nature that surround us, and to consider how we might cultivate different, more attentive relationships with our environment.
Still from Paradise Pt II, Mirka Duijn, 2025.
General interest
In the quest to make sense of their environment, humans rely on narratives, stories and myths that they tell themselves and others. But the narratives that are shaped around our relation to nature are heavily influenced by the natural colonial-gaze, a lens through which nature has often been perceived as a realm to be dominated and controlled.
Throughout history, narratives have shaped our perception of nature as an external, pristine entity, fostering an idealized escape from the complexities of human existence. However, this idealized portrayal has hindered our capacity to foster a holistic and sustainable rapport with the environment, resulting in a disconnect between our constructed stories and the complex realities they represent.
Despite the growing awareness of the need for a paradigm shift in our narrative approach to nature, we continue to struggle in reconciling the preconceived notions of the romanticized and enlightened views of nature. This tension between the constructed narrative and the authentic reality of our environmental challenges has led to a profound disconnect, perpetuating the colonial proposition that nature exists solely for our exploitation and benefit.
Telephone poles disguised as trees in Utah. In exploring the contemporary landscape and tracing the historical trajectory of humanity's portrayal of nature, it becomes evident that the roots of this dissonance can be found in the flawed narratives that have long dominated our understanding of the natural world.
Paradise Pt II project will exist out of a mosaic of case studies around this proposition. We are working with cases where there is a tension between the narrative that is created and the underlying represented reality. We will both focus on the present day, as well as tracing back history of the image of nature, asking ourselves the question: where and how did it go wrong, and with what consequences?
The first sequoia tree that was transported to a world fair in England, after being ‘discovered’ in California by Western settlers. The bark was stripped off the original tree, transported and assembled at the fair. The tree was assembled so poorly, that visitors thought the it was a fake, a hoax, and for several years the discovery was not taken seriously at all. Shangri-La, Paradise under Construction
Documentary, 2023
Directors: Mirka Duijn & Nina Spiering
A travelogue through Shangri-La; the fictitious paradise from the classic novel Lost Horizon (1933). Twenty years ago a Tibetan tourist spot in China presented scientific proof that it was the real Shangri-La. In her search for the truth behind the supposed evidence the filmmaker excavates layers of fact and fiction of the area. What words and images have attached themselves to facts? How do stories come into being and how do they shape reality?
Presently, the film is being internationally distributed, making its way to various festivals, television broadcasts, and video-on-demand platforms.
The film is part of a wider research project, with multiple outcomes, amongst which publications, installations and lecture performances. Read more about the research behind the project here.
Distribution
TV
SVT Sweden, 2023
NPO Netherlands, due in 2023
Festivals
World premiere at IDFA, International Film Festival in Amsterdam, 2022, in competition for Best Dutch Documentary.
DocPoint Tallin/Helsinki 2023, Trento Internation
al Film Festival 2023, Millennium Docs Against Gravity Warsaw 2023 Dutch Film Festival 2023
Film Theatre
Theatrical release in 23 film theatres in the Netherlands in January 2023.
VOD/TVOD
World wide: Amazon Prime, Apple. Youtube pay per view.
Nominations, prices
Nominated ‘Best Dutch Documentary at IDFA, 2022’, Nominated Best Film Music for Documentary, BUMA Netherlands, 2023’, in Competition at Trento Film Festival, 2023, in Competition at Millennium Docs Against Gravity Warsaw 2023
SVT Sweden, 2023
NPO Netherlands, due in 2023
Festivals
World premiere at IDFA, International Film Festival in Amsterdam, 2022, in competition for Best Dutch Documentary.
DocPoint Tallin/Helsinki 2023, Trento Internation
al Film Festival 2023, Millennium Docs Against Gravity Warsaw 2023 Dutch Film Festival 2023
Film Theatre
Theatrical release in 23 film theatres in the Netherlands in January 2023.
VOD/TVOD
World wide: Amazon Prime, Apple. Youtube pay per view.
Nominations, prices
Nominated ‘Best Dutch Documentary at IDFA, 2022’, Nominated Best Film Music for Documentary, BUMA Netherlands, 2023’, in Competition at Trento Film Festival, 2023, in Competition at Millennium Docs Against Gravity Warsaw 2023
International Sales:
Journeyman Pictures
Produced by:
De Productie (NL),
Film Kreatörerna (SE),
Studio Kimmo (NL)
Funded by:
Dutch Film Fund,
Amsterdam Fund for the Art
Swedish Film Fund.
Read the reviews in Newspapers:
NRC Newspaper ︎︎︎︎
Volkskrant ︎︎︎
Fries Dagblad ︎︎︎︎
Telegraaf ︎︎︎1/2
Parool review
Trouw review
Filmkrant review
Read the international Modern Times Review:
“In their film Shangri-La, Paradise under Construction, directors Mirka Duijn and Nina Spiering reconsidered the most basic premises of documentary filmmaking – truth, evidence, and interpretation.”
“Even if the fantastic nature of Shangri-La might indicate that this documentary will be about fantasy, it is not. The key theme of Shangri-La, Paradise Under Construction, is the reality and the mysterious ways of its construction.” - Melita Zajc
Read the international IDA-review:
“A film that richly explores the creation of meaning from different perspectives that infuse the project of “paradise under construction,” and leaves viewers with hard questions to ask themselves about exoticization and power.” - Patricia Aufderheide
Other media:
Listen to an interview on Opium Radio (in Dutch).
Interview in the Dutch Film Newspaper: Filmkrant (in Dutch).
Interview in SEE.NL (in English).
Listen to an interview on the Ketelhuis Podcast (In Dutch).
