The international labor rights NGO Mondiaal FNV believes that union membership is key to improving working conditions for women in the garment industry. To get this message out, they brought on Jongsma + O’Neill to create a series of unconventional portraits of female union members in Indonesia.The film The Negotiator, which features union leader Dewi Demayanti, is a fiction-documentary hybrid featuring an improvised script created in collaboration with actual garment workers, and performed by Dewi and her colleagues

America’s west coast entered the 2020’s in free fall. Cost of living soared, and homelessness spiked. Droughts and wildfires ravaged rural communities. Police and activists clashed in the cities. COVID-19 spread unabated.

In the midst of this chaos, the Dutch public broadcaster HUMAN asked us to reflect on our life in California with a short documentary about wildfire season for their award-winning series 2Doc Kort. 

Over the next two years, this commission grew into a highly-personal, three-film series covering climate change, the future of food, and social unrest in our little corner of the USA.

Every Lunar New Year, tourists converge on the Taiwanese village of Pingxi to launch thousands of floating lanterns into the night sky. The lanterns represent the wishes of their owners—and make for one hell of an Instagram post.

But what happens when dawn breaks, the tourists leave, and the thousands of wishes fall out of the sky?

Weaving virtual reality and conventional 2D filmmaking, What Goes Up // Must Come Down fuses two discrete documentaries about the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival into a singular whole, and suggests that our dreams may have staggering, real-world consequences.

Conservation and biotechnology collide in The Ark, a virtual reality documentary that puts viewers face-to-face with the northern white rhino—the world’s most endangered species. 

A groundbreaking example of VR’s capacity to put audiences in places they would not normally have access to, The Ark invites viewers to walk alongside the rhinos’ bodyguard squad in Kenya, and meet the San Diego-based scientists using rhino DNA to create new animals inside a petri dish.

How does a 177-year-old journalistic institution find its place as a storytelling innovator without losing its trusted voice?

This is the question that animated our three-year collaboration with The Economist Media Lab, and gave form to the award-winning experiences produced during Kel’s tenure as the magazine’s Senior Media Lab Fellow.

During this time, Kel spearheaded The Economist’s interactive and immersive efforts, helping them staff up and build out a VR studio within the magazine’s Media Lab, and shaping the creative direction of their productions.

We created and directed two documentary series for the subscription-based Dutch journalism platform De Correspondent:

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) tells the stories of creative technologists who use their skills to craft applications that critique and undermine the goals of Big Tech, and;

3 x Utopia takes a look at a wild collection of amateur astronauts, church security guards, and zombie-obsessed doomsday preppers carving out space for themselves away from mainstream society.

When Siemens and branding agency Virtual Identity asked us to direct a documentary for their /answers campaign, we jumped at the opportunity.

The brief was enticingly slim: create a film that highlights the unexpected ways Siemens’ technology impacts our everyday lives. 

Shot over the course of a week in Mumbai, our documentary The Milky Way profiles the young animal welfare activists behind Animals Matter to Me, who use milk processed with Siemens’ equipment to keep their rescue shelter running.

A hidden synagogue in the mountains of Indonesia. A goldmine in Suriname run by the descendants of runaway slaves. A white supremacist enclave in the South African desert. 

These are only a few of the communities brought to light in Empire, the Emmy-nominated immersive documentary project about the current day legacy of Dutch colonialism.

Shot in ten countries over four years, Empire uses nonfiction filmmaking and cutting-edge technology to reveal how the actions of a handful of 17th-century traders still shape our world today.

As the original US Correspondents for VPRO and Hivos’ pioneering TV/online show Metropolis, we directed, produced, shot and edited over 35 short documentaries covering a wide range of subjects including Vietnam War reenactors, volunteer border patrol squads, and pandrogynous rock stars.

Metropolis was streaming TV before streaming TV: each weekly episode brought together clips from documentaries from around the world, commissioned from local correspondents, and organized around a common theme. In addition, VPRO also made each of the correspondents’ uncut films available online, building an impressive international audience.