JANIS PUGH

Writer-director

Janis Pugh has been making no-budget shorts, inspired by the stories of her home town of Flint in north Wales, for almost a decade. Her break came in 2005 with documentary short House about elderly women playing bingo and reminiscing about their lives. It won her a scholarship to the London Film School. Pugh graduated last year with Blue Collars And Buttercups which screened at the Locarno, Lodz and Brest film festivals. Part-autobiographical, it is about a young woman with dreams of escaping a life of drudgery in a chicken factory. Mixing quirky visuals with a vivid sense of location, the film's humour and authentic characters have won Pugh fans in the UKFC and the BBC. She is about to shoot a short opera for ITV Wales and is developing the short Magna Mater about the changing stages of women's lives. Then there are two features: Balaclava Sands about a girl growing up during the social and economic chaos of the 1980s, and Sitting On The Fence With God, which will be a shift in gear from her usual style. 'My films give a voice to a section of the UK whose stories have been ignored for too long,' she says.