A no budget film is a produced film made with very little, or no money.

Young directors starting out in filmmaking commonly use this method because there are few other options available to them at that point. All the actors and technicians are employed without remuneration, and the films are largely non-profit. Usually the director works alone on such films, or uses a very minimum "crew" of volunteers to assist him/her on such projects where no money or financing is available, not including the cost of film. No-budget films are made every day with video tapes and consumer cameras.

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), which was produced on a budget of Rs. 150,000 Along with the other films in Ray's The Apu Trilogy the film is frequently listed among the greatest films of all time. In 1960, Ron Rice released The Flower Thief, starring Taylor Mead, to great acclaim. The film was produced for less than $1000 using black-and-white 16mm 50' film cartridges left over from aerial gunnery equipment used during World War II. In the early 1960s, filmmaker Jack Smith used discarded color reversal film stock to film his no budget film classic, Flaming Creatures. John Waters' 1964 black-and-white film Hag in a Black Leather Jacket allegedly cost $30.00 to make. Craig Baldwin's Flick Skin is entirely made from discarded film, or "found footage", retrieved from a projectionist's booth. The No Wave Cinema movement of the late 1970s, represented by filmmakers such as Vivienne Dick, produced many notable no budget films shot on Super 8 such as Beauty Becomes The Beast. In 1993, Sarah Jacobson's first film, I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, was made with "one camera, one tape recorder, one mic and, like, four lights".G.B. Jones took 13 years to film, direct and edit on Super 8mm the feature film The Lollipop Generation, which was filmed whenever she could afford to buy a roll of film, and finally released in 2008.

Elliot Grove is a Canadian-born film producer who founded both the Raindance Film Festival in 1993 and the British Independent Film Awards in 1998.

Despite being unable to watch TV or films until his early teens due to the constraints of his Amish background, Grove was curious about art and film. He, thus, followed up formal art school training at Central Technical School in Toronto, Ontario with a series of jobs behind the scenes in the film industry.

Working as a scenic artist on 68 feature films and over 700 commercials in his native Toronto, he developed a distaste for the wasted resources on set and union bureaucracy that prevented aspiring filmmakers like himself from getting their own features off the ground.

Elliot moved to London in the late 1980s and in 1993 he launched the Raindance Film Festival, a festival devoted to independent filmmaking and its emerging talent. In 2009 he was awarded a doctorate from the Open University at Plymouth College of Art.

Initially, Raindance catered mainly to American independent filmmakers, but over the years the participants have become more global. The 2007 festival line-up included 93 independent features and 150 shorts from 52 countries.

Anurag Singh Kashyap (born 10 September 1972) is an Indian film director and screenwriter. As a filmmaker, he is known for Black Friday (2004), a controversial and award-winning Hindi film about the 1993 Bombay bombings, followed by No Smoking (2007), Dev D (2009) and Gulaal (2009). As a screenwriter, he wrote the scripts for the Filmfare Award-winning Satya (1998) and the Academy Award-nominated Canadian film Water (2005).

In 1999, Kashyap won the Best Screenplay award for Satya at the Star Screen Awards. The next year, his short film Last Train to Mahakali won the Special Jury Award at the same awards. His feature film debut Black Friday won the Grand Jury Prize at the 3rd Annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (2005), and was a nominee for the "Golden Leopard" (Best Film) at the 57th Locarno International Film Festival (2004). In 2010, he announced his association with Tumbhi where he and his team will make six short films for Tumbhi and start his blog with them, as well. He was listed on the The DNA power list: Top 50 influentials, a list of 50 most influential Indians in 2011.