Premila Puri makes short films where kindness is the dramatic engine — and helps other people make theirs.
As producer, her films have been selected at film festivals across four continents, including the Academy Award–qualifying New York International Children's Film Festival. Itsy screened at more than twenty festivals worldwide, carries an original score by Segun Akinola — lead composer of BBC's Doctor Who — and now sits proudly in the Be Kind Movement schools catalogue. She has also executive produced films by other teams, including In Too Deep as co-executive producer with the team behind the Oscar-winning The Silent Child, co-produced Delhi Boom!, and line produced the feature Nine Nights.
Alongside the short films, she founded the registered charity Be Kind Movement, spending a decade putting kindness to work in the real world — running film workshops in schools and using story to start conversations that last longer than the credits.
Born and raised in Mumbai and educated in the Netherlands and the UK, she came to film from an unusual direction — a career in recruitment before turning to storytelling — which is why she's as comfortable with pitches, a funding application and a chain of title as she is on a set. It's also why filmmakers come to her for advice on getting a short off the ground.
She is a member of BAFTA Connect, an alumna of the BAFTA Albert X Together Films Impact Accelerator Programme and the Rotterdam Film Lab. For her work as founder and CEO of Be Kind Movement she has been recognised at the GG2 Leadership Awards, the British Diversity Awards, National Diversity Awards, and won the Charity Champion award at the Best Business Women Awards. She’s also the recipient of the British Asian Women's Award (Arts & Culture), and a finalist at the Women's Enterprise Awards. She launched the first Kindness in Film Summit in 2021 during Covid-19 championing kindness in front of and behind the camera. Premila is also the founder of KindInvest, an e-learning platform bringing kindness and emotional intelligence to corporates and SMEs
