Inner Healing and Growth 

In a world dominated by finance, markets and technology, terms like empathy, holistic healing, self-confidence and self-expression, and emotional intelligence have become buzzwords not just in the social sphere but even in the corporate world.

Dinara Punchihewa is the founder of Punchi Actors an initiative that puts together drama, dance and other artistic techniques to support social and emotional learning in young children.

Her love for cinema and theatre extends beyond needing to be within a frame or the parameters of a stage. Since working as a minor production hand on the British television series: the Good Karma Hospital and acting in pivotal roles in five independent films, she has branched out into directing her own short film, published a children’s book called Drama and Play, and founded Punchi Actors to introduce children to the arts and theatres, to build confidence and self-expression.

At 29, performance arts remain a lifelong intellectual pursuit and passion, rather than one that revolves solely around the glitz and glamour of the field. Five independent feature films in, Punchihewa’s enthusiasm for cinema and the arts is incredibly contagious. She fondly recalls a critic’s admiration for her role in Prasanna Vithannage’s Gaadi (2019). They were praising the subtlety and powerfulness of expressions in Tikiri, she beams, grateful for the admiration of the finer details of her role. She does agree that she has a knack for roles that challenge her and thereby challenge the idea of social conventions. 

Tikiri, her character in Gaadi seeks to defy the fate she is handed, as she is stripped of her main identity: being a noblewoman in a patriarchal Kandyan society. She muses over how the film itself challenges the ideas Sri Lankans themselves have of the past—one that is filled with a bygone glory, sanitized of the every day realities normal people would have experienced outside of layers of power. 

Dinara desires to keep taking on more demanding projects in films and expand Punchi Actors as a community resource to more vulnerable groups in need of holistic healing, self-confidence and self-expression building, which she believes drama as an art form can offer.