As a young student of history I could not have imagined myself as sometime being an Oscar nominee. Film has always interested me, but I got involved in it in a roundabout way. I come from an academic family, but not a single artist can be found among my relatives. I could not have even dreamed that I would be writing for my work. Somewhere lurking was a dream to do just that. First she had to overcome her own sense of shame and conquer her demons.

Once I had graduated and worked as a freelance journalist, at the age of thirty I began to study scriptwriting. Later I went to study the subject at Aalto University. I soon found myself employed. The mini-series Paratiisi was written in 2010 and the feature-length film Korso in 2014. I have written for television, as well as shorts, the best known being the Oscar-nominated Pitääkö mun kaikki hoitaa? (‘Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?’).

It is very useful for a screenwriter to have studied history, even if I had not penned a magnum opus. I actually have the same interests as when I was a student. In those days microhistory was all the rage. It refers to how ordinary, everyday things can affect the big things. Many of my scripts follow the same idea: attention paid to small and ordinary details can reveal the bigger picture of things, such as social exclusion or the respective roles of men and women. But I only discovered the importance of humour quite some time after studying history.

In some sense I’ve never really left the University. I used to write in the main library and now I do my writing in the Kaisa undergraduate library. I like the concentrated atmosphere and the silence of the university libraries, where the phones are set to silent. No other place works, especially when the scriptwriting is at a delicate stage. And it is encouraging to know that in the past every text – whether it was a seminar presentation, a Master’s thesis, or a film script – has been brought to completion ‘within the portals’ of the University.