Merja Ritola started her career in the film industry working in the wardrobe department. It’s in 2000 that she made the jump to producing and started working as a production assistant, later reaching the position of production management. Finally in 2009 she decided to start producing short films, she now also works with documentaries and fiction features in her production company Greenlit Productions, based in Finland and Australia, founded with partner Essi Haukkamaa in 2017.
The company’s aim is to discover talented, creative and original filmmakers and let them be heard. Ritola explains this is what draw her to the Boostyourfilm project.“I believe as a producer that this could be one of the platforms to discover new talent, original stories and attention-grabbing projects.”
Regarding the Boostyour15pages contest she encourages film lovers to no let this opportunity pass and shares with us, as a producer, what grabs her attention in a script as well as what she expects to find in the projects that compete in our short film contest. “When I start to read a screenplay and I can’t stop, later after reading the whole script I feel like I’ve seen the whole film in front of my eyes. That makes me tick, as a producer this grabs my attention. Also when you see and feel more than what it’s written on the paper. You know the person who wrote it is a talented screenwriter.”
Ritola’s productions include the feature documentary The Seamstress by Ville Suhonen, which won in 2016 a Jussi Award for Best Documentary Film, and the award-winning short films The Best Friend by Johan Karrento, The Bicycle Man by Aarne Norberg, the internationally acclaimed feature documentary The Voice of Sokurov by Leena Kilpeläinen and the fiction feature Apeiron by Maria Ruotsala.
Latest productions: Iron Sky, Beyond.
