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 BFI 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 is the feature: The musical Balaclava Sands about a girl growing up during the social and economic chaos of the 1980s. "My films give a voice to a section of the UK whose stories have been ignored for too long," she says."

Blue Collars and Buttercups was very well received at festivals all over the world and won two awards, one at LODZ (Poland) and The Encounters Film Festival (Britain) where it received special commendation award. It provoked much interest at festivals in Tampere (Finland), Tel Aviv, Prague, Munich, Cannes short film corner, Exposures, Portugal, Italy. Locarno (Switzerland), Brest (France) and screened in Paris. 
The film caught the eye of the UKFC who recommended Janis to Screen International as a 'Star of Tomorrow' as a filmmaker to look out for, and the article gave the audience a taster of what is yet to come. 
Janis says: "When I was writing Blue Collars all I thought about was telling a simple story and connecting it to an audience. After making House (see Trailers) I was certain that I wanted to go back to North Wales to make my graduation film, it just felt right. There is something unique about the landscape, the people and their voice. 
"You see, I am a Flint girl, I grew up in Flint during the 80s and during that period it lost an enormous part of its heart mainly due to the political turmoil of the times, when that happened it shaped a new generation of voices, my generation and my voice.
"The whole idea came from my personal story about growing up in a Flint. It's about wanting something different from what society expects from you. I come from a working class family, a family who have either worked in the service industry or in factories. We are a "production line" of blue collar workers and that's the feeling I wanted the film to have, a production line of nightmares and dreams."
Tina, the main character in the film played by Louise Kempton, walks on stilts everywhere, but it was important that whoever she encountered on her journey took absolutely no notice of that fact. The stilts are her status platform; they turn her into something different. They make her different from the rest of her family. She stands out, and that's her only desire to stand out and be viewed differently. That's a hard thing to achieve when you come from a small town where without fault to anyone, the continuation of being in work is far more important than following your dreams.

Magnificent because: She’s passionate about producing films that mean something to her rather than being driven by purely commercial concerns. With awards under her belt and film festivals clamouring to screen her work, she’s an emerging talent in British cinema.