Janis Pugh
Born in the seventies in a working class industrial area of North Wales, I benefited from a proud council house upbringing (7 of us squeezed into the slapping and shouting stage) I was surrounded by dynamic and distinctly vocal working class people. Their frustrations, evolving from the constraints and limitations placed upon them by the social and historical context of the eighties and in the light of their wasted potential, was a tangible force of energy in our town. That particular energy and the tone and milieu of those times, I’ve strived to bring to my work. I started to make ‘small’ films at the beginning of 2003 and subsequently (gratefully) I won a scholarship to study at the London Film School. Over the last decade I have made films which express my passion, my sense of social complexities and my desire to undermine conventional realism. My work, subtly poses questions about the world in which we live, identity, class and the many manifestations (positive and negative) of love. My work is both personal and accessible as it concerns itself with universal, shared themes, about how we connect and relate to each other in beautiful and sometimes ugly ways. Death, a somewhat western taboo is also a preoccupation of mine following the loss of three significant matriarchal figures in my life and within a very short time frame.
