The Cardiff Mini Film Festival is designed to showcase films made with little or no budget, but bucket-loads of hard work and dedication from passionate film-makers.

Here Jody Tozer – director of festival organisers Bulldozer Films – talks about what the festival can offer to budding film makers, and their upcoming events.

“The Cardiff Mini Film Festival is brought to you by Bulldozer Films, bringing film makers from the community together to collaborate on films.

Bulldozer Films is a social scheme that creates films in the community. We have currently submitted our recent project to film festivals, and fund ourselves through the proceeds of the door entry of the mini film festival.

The Mini Film Festival provides a platform for film makers to screen their works and compete for prizes, whilst giving them an opportunity to network with actors, musicians and other film makers who they may be able to collaborate with in the future.

Special guests do make an appearance at the events that are professionals in the industry, such as Boyd Clack, Kirsten Jones and Philip John, who are happy to offer tips and advice to attendees.

The film festival takes place every few months with different themes. The upcoming one on the August 19 at Gwdihw is purely for music videos, and the one after that on the October 7 is for horror films, and is part of the Oxjam Takeover. We screen 10 short listed films on the evening and have a special guest to hand out the prizes for the winner, runner up and highly commended films.

It is free to submit films to the festival as we don’t believe that film makers should be penalised for creating something that might not even get short listed. After all, they are the ones who have put so much effort and passion into their film, why make them pay to receive acknowledgement, or even worse pay to not receive any.

We operate in a very different way from other film festivals, with regular mini film festivals throughout the year, creating a sense of a film making community. We don’t take submissions through sterile submission services, we purely operate through email so that film makers get a response when we receive their entry and they know that it will be judged.

We gain professionals from the industry to judge the entries and we have been fortunate enough so far to have Philip John (director of Being Human, New Tricks and Ashes to Ashes) to judge the first festival for us. He is now on our advisory board and offers us guidance with how the festival will run.

Our music video festival is being judged by Ewan Jones Morris, who has directed music videos for DJ Shadow and Charlotte Church.

I wanted to start up the mini film festival as I felt that Cardiff really needed something like this. Being a film maker myself, I felt that I lacked an outlet for my work and the nearest film festival to compete in was Newport. I was surprised with Cardiff being such a creative hub that a festival did not exist; therefore I wanted to cater for that.

Having won awards for my films, whilst at University, I know how doing well in events like this can propel you, giving you the confidence to succeed.”

The next Cardiff Mini Film Festival Event is on August 19 a Gwdihw on Guildford Crescent. The event, which will start at 6.30pm, will focus on music videos. More details can be found at the Cardiff Mini Film Festival website. You can also follow them on Twitter, @cardiffminifilm, and on Facebook at the Cardiff Mini Film Festival page. Film festival entries can be e-mailed to filmsbulldozer@gmail.com