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.
Mirka Duijn is a Senior Lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand in Göteborg, where she teaches 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.
Mirka Duijn is a Senior Lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand in Göteborg, where she teaches 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)