Using Django's templating engine without the rest of Django
In order for the loader to find your templates; you need to have the directory where the templates are located in your TEMPLATE_DIRS tuple in settings.py. By default django will search for a templates directory inside an application so if you don't have an application registered; django cannot find templates.
If you are after a "django like" template engine, jinja is very close to django's syntax and is completely self-contained, you won't run into unexpected issues as you are facing now.