Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival Returns With Soderbergh Tribute, 400-Plus Submissions

The Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival opens Thursday for its second year, bringing four days of screenings, workshops and parties to the Manship Theatre in downtown Baton Rouge. Organizers say this year's lineup is bigger than the inaugural run, with more panels, more parties and more screenings packed into the Thursday-through-Sunday schedule at 100 Lafayette St.

Known as BRUFF, the festival is co-founded by Joe Carleton, who serves as the event's financial director. As reported by NOLA.com, Carleton said the festival is bigger and better in its second year. Submissions have surged accordingly: BRUFF received about 150 project submissions in its first year and topped 400 submissions this time around, according to the same report. From that pool, organizers selected nine feature films and 56 short films for this year's festival.

A Soderbergh Homage Opens the Weekend

The festival opens with a Thursday night gala built around a screening of the 1989 independent film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, according to NOLA.com. The film was shot in Baton Rouge, with scenes filmed at a duplex in Ogden Park, a residence in Riverbend and the dive bar The Bayou on Chimes Street, per 225 Magazine. The movie is widely regarded as a starting point of independent cinema, and its director, Baton Rouge native Steven Soderbergh, became the youngest solo director in history to win the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or, taking the prize at age 26 in 1989, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica. Soderbergh went on to become a major Hollywood filmmaker after his start in Baton Rouge, where he took film animation classes at LSU before heading west.

Festival organizers contacted Soderbergh about attending this year's event, but he was unable to make it, per NOLA.com's reporting. Carleton told the outlet that Soderbergh is excited about the festival and its screening of his breakout film, and organizers say they hope to host him at BRUFF in a future year.

Workshops, Panels and Analog Film

Beyond the screenings, BRUFF leans into hands-on education for local filmmakers. Workshop participants will shoot footage on actual film this year, with the analog processing lab Shawscope leading a workshop on shooting film and promoting analog filmmaking techniques, per NOLA.com. The festival has also expanded its panel discussions and workshop offerings compared to its first year.

NOVAC, described in NOLA.com's report as a video production service based in New Orleans, is providing a workshop series as one of the festival's educational partners. The organization was established in 1972 through the AmeriCorps VISTA program and is considered the Gulf South's longest-operating media arts nonprofit, according to inRegister. NOVAC maintains a regional workforce office inside Celtic Studios in Baton Rouge, the same report notes, and focuses on training local low-to-moderate-income residents for behind-the-scenes jobs in television and film production.

Also on the schedule is In-Depth Live, a program featuring sound designers who have worked on Louisiana productions, including Dune, according to NOLA.com. With nine features, 56 shorts, workshops and panels all competing for attention across four days, festival organizers are encouraging attendees to prioritize screenings and build their own personalized schedules rather than try to catch everything.

Prizes, Tickets and Growing Ambitions

BRUFF also awards The Shoestring, a $5,000 cash prize given to the filmmaker judged to have achieved the most creative impact with the fewest financial resources, according to FilmFreeway. Ticket prices for the festival range from $20 to $75, per NOLA.com, and organizers are still seeking volunteers, with information available at batonrougeunderground.com.

The festival's first year drew about 1,800 attendees over four days in 2025, according to NOLA.com. That inaugural run also came with institutional backing: tourism agency Visit Baton Rouge signed on as BRUFF's headline sponsor under a multi-year partnership committed through at least 2027, per 225 Magazine.

BRUFF's organizers have also worked to raise Baton Rouge's profile among industry insiders far beyond Louisiana. In May, festival co-founders hosted what was called The Unoriginal Films Happy Hour at the Cannes Film Festival in France, part of FilmUSA's official delegation programming, to promote Baton Rouge's independent film scene to an international audience, according to FilmUSA.

Filling a Gap Left by an Earlier Festival

BRUFF emerged as an effort to rebuild Baton Rouge's local film community after the Baton Rouge International Film Festival ended in 2019 following an eight-year run, according to 225 Magazine. The festival was co-founded by four LSU film school graduates who pitched the concept after concluding the capital city lacked a centralized film festival following pandemic-era cancellations, the outlet reported.

The festival's setting reflects Baton Rouge's broader standing in Louisiana's film industry. The Manship Theatre, where BRUFF is held, is an intimate 325-seat nonprofit performing arts space inside the Shaw Center for the Arts downtown, which opened in 2005 as a cultural and economic anchor for the area, according to Wanderlog. Baton Rouge is also home to Celtic Studios, Louisiana's largest production facility, spanning 29 gated acres with 150,000 square feet of stage space across seven soundstages that have hosted productions including Tom Cruise's Oblivion and Disney's National Treasure: Edge of History, per 225 Magazine.

That production infrastructure is bolstered by state policy. Under Louisiana's restructured motion picture tax incentive program known as Act 44, production companies can receive up to a 40% tax credit on qualified state expenditures, with $15 million reserved specifically for independent film productions out of a $125 million annual state cap, according to TheGreenShot. The set-aside was designed to keep independent features from being crowded out by larger studio productions, the outlet reported, positioning Baton Rouge as both a low-budget indie incubator and a major regional production hub as BRUFF enters its second year.