Triin Sarapik-Kivi is an Estonian stop-motion animator and textile artist based in Tallinn, where she works at Nukufilm – the studio founded in 1957 and today the largest stop-motion animation house in Northern Europe. She works in the same tradition that lies at the heart of Trollfilm: semi-flat cut-out figures of paper, textile and plaster, animated frame by frame on a multiplane glass table. Known especially for her precision with replacement and cut-out animation, she is a natural fellow traveller of ours.

Over the years, Triin has become one of Trollfilm's most valued collaborators. She has animated on three of our productions – The King Who Wanted More Than a Crown (1999), Angry Man (2009) and Quiet (2018) – lending her hand and her eye to films made here at Dovre. On The King Who Wanted More Than a Crown she animated together with Märt Kivi, a fellow Nukufilm animator with whom she has often worked.

At home in Estonia her credits run deep, from Nukufilm's celebrated puppet films to international co-productions – among them The Old Man Movie (2019), Captain Morten and the Spider Queen (2018), and Elin Grimstad's Norwegian-Estonian Eternal Hunting Grounds (2016), made in the same multiplane glass technique and awarded the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig. In 2013 she was among the Nukufilm creative team honoured with the Estonian Cultural Endowment's annual animation award.

Her love of material reaches beyond the animation table. She has studied traditional Estonian textile art at the Viljandi Culture Academy (University of Tartu), completing a 2023 diploma project on historical Estonian detachable collars – and designing a modern clothing collection of her own, drawn from historical patterns and craft techniques. That same feeling for texture and the handmade is exactly what she brings to the frame.

The bond between Trollfilm and Nukufilm runs through people like Triin: two studios on either side of the Baltic, sharing the same belief in the handmade, the material, and the quiet power of stop-motion. We are grateful for her craft, and glad to count her among the friends and partners we return to.

Contact: Triin Sarapik-Kivi can be reached at: triinsarapikkivi@gmail.com