I'm Piia Puntola
a producer and screenwriter turned story editor and sustainability consultant dedicated to turning good narratives into truly impactful ones, while advocating for greener production practices in the industry as a whole.
I work in a fascinating cross-roads between helping film and TV productions across the Nordics reduce their environmental footprint, and developing impactful stories with writers, directors, and production companies who want to maximise the positive handprint of their narratives.
I gratuated with a MA in Film & Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2010, and been working in the industry for the past 15 years seeing a lot of different-scale productions from independent documentary and art film to big Hollywood entertainment and everything in between.
My relationship to the surrounding world and our responsibility to protect it was shaped by my time in living in Northern Finland for two years. Working on massive Hollywood productions and seeing the wastefulness dictated by the busy and ever-changing production plans higlighted for me how much there is to do in the field of sustainability in film.
I spent years working as a producer in Finnish film and television. Over time, the question I couldn't stop asking was a simple one: what are we leaving behind? Not just on screen but physically, on set and in the supply chain. My most recent productions have earned Albert certifications, and that process changed how I think about what responsible production actually looks like in practice.
Alongside that, I've spent the last two years working as a script editor and story developer training in climate narrative development with Climate Spring and the Torino Film Lab, and studying sustainability leadership and climate communications at the University of Helsinki. The through-line, I've come to believe, isn't a stretch: the industry needs to change both what it makes and how it makes it.
What I believe
The biggest obstacle we face isn't denial, and it isn't ignorance. It's apathy — the creeping sense that the future is already written, that what we do doesn't add up to anything. And apathy, I think, is largely a story problem.
Most people care deeply about the world they're leaving behind. What they lack isn't concern — it's agency. The feeling that their choices connect to something larger, that the people around them share their values, that a different kind of future is actually imaginable. These aren't things that policy papers or data can give people. But stories can.
Not naive stories. Not stories where the problems are solved too easily or the heroes are too clean. What I'm interested in is something closer to radical hope — the kind that doesn't depend on certainty, but on the belief that acting well, even in the dark, is worth doing. Stories that give audiences a map, not a destination. Stories that build the sense of collective possibility that makes change feel real.
The world is made of agreements. And agreements can be remade.
