News

Part addiction self-portrait, part medical exposé, Benjamin Flaherty’s powerful, essayistic “Shuffle” was the winner of this year’s Documentary Feature Competition at SXSW. The film offers an intimate chronicle of three drug users and several whistleblowers trying to turn over new leaves, as they gradually paint a chilling portrait of a predatory system of faux-recovery.

Focusing on a number of rehab facilities in Florida, “Shuffle” weaves together a detailed fabric of the “who,” “how” and “why” concerning the structural abuse of addicts seeking recovery. It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.

Flaherty is the film’s key narratory, but...

It’s no secret that America has an addiction problem on its hands, but Benjamin Flaherty’s SXSW-winning documentary “Shuffle” makes the case that it also has a rehab problem.

A look into the lives of three Florida residents who struggle to free themselves from a predatory system of for-profit recovery centers that benefit from their reliance on substances, the film depicts a depressingly familiar pattern of institutions failing the very individuals they exist to help. A former addict himself, Flaherty uses his own sobriety journey as a starting point to discuss the ways that corrupt facilities can play with patients’ lives as a means of scamming insurance companies, ultimately making the argument that true recovery can only be accomplished through a communal effort of people who genuinely care about each other.

Scenic views and lax regulations helped turn South Florida into the rehab capital of the world. Hundreds of facilities exist throughout the state,...

The 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival announced its award winners on Wednesday night, with Slanted from Amy Wang chosen as this year’s narrative feature winner.

“This unflinching satirical thriller examines racial identity in a bold and skin-tingling new way. Featuring simmering performances by the cast, this film is both specific to the fractured identity of Asian Americans and universally relatable in its theme of desperately needing to belong,” said narrative feature jury members Clayton Davis (Variety), Rebecca Ford (Vanity Fair), and Ryan Lattanzio (Indiewire) in a joint statement. “The director’s vulnerability in mining her personal experience combined with her delicate and daring filmmaking create a haunting piece that lingers long after the credits roll.”

The narrative feature jury also awarded special honors to Annapurna Sriram for her film F--ktoys and actress Amanda Peet (Fantasy Life).

“Annapurna Sriram is a visionary force, a rare artist whose work is as daring as it is singular.

The South by Southwest Conference and Festivals tonight announced its 2025 Jury and Special Award winners.

Amy Wang’s Slanted, which the jury called an “unflinching satirical thriller” about identity, won the Narrative Feature competition. Special Jury awards went to director/writer/actress Annapurna Sriram for Fucktoys and actress Amanda Peet for Fantasy Life.

Shuffle directed by Benjamin Flaherty won the Documentary Feature competition, with Special Jury Awards going to The Python Hunt directed by Xander Robin and Remaining Native directed by Paige Bethmann.

All 2025 film & TV festival projects will be eligible for category-specific Audience Awards that will be certified by the accounting firm of Maxwell Locke & Ritter. Audience Award Voting will conclude on Saturday, March 15. Winners will be announced that week.

“The energy at SXSW has been absolutely electric this week! Our theaters have been packed with passionate audiences embracing the incredible diversity of stories in our lineup,” said Claudette Godfrey,...

Slanted, directed by Amy Wang, won the grand jury prize in the narrative competition section of the 2025 SXSW Film and TV festival.

Slanted follows Joan Huang, a senior in high school who undergoes an experimental racial transformation to become white and win Prom Queen.

“This unflinching satirical thriller examines racial identity in a bold and skin-tingling new way. Featuring simmering performances by the cast, this film is both specific to the fractured identity of Asian Americans and universally relatable in its theme of desperately needing to belong,” wrote the competition jury, Variety‘s Clayton Davis, Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Ford and IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio, about Slanted.

In the narrative section, special jury awards were given to Annapurna Sriram for Fucktoys and Amanda Peet for Fantasy Life for multihyphenate and performance, respectively.

Shuffle directed by Benjamin Flaherty, which follows three people in treatment to dig into insurance-fueled cycle of addiction treatment fraud,...

Shifting the attention from starry premieres at Austin’s Paramount Theatre to the independent film and TV projects that make up the majority of its lineup, the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival has announced the jury awards for its 2025 edition.

Amy Wang’s “Slanted” won the narrative feature competition, rewarding the tonal and thematic audacity of a high school comedy with boundary-pushing “The Substance” vibes. Wang, who also wrote the upcoming “Crazy Rich Asians” sequel, challenges beauty standards in a culture that idealizes whiteness, imagining a Chinese American teen (Shirley Chen) so desperate to be elected prom queen that she undergoes a radical identity-reconstruction procedure (she’s played by Mckenna Grace post-operation). The insecure teen immediately enjoys the perks of white privilege, but isn’t at all prepared for the downsides.

“This unflinching satirical thriller examines racial identity in a bold and skin-tingling new way,” said the jury, praising...

The South by Southwest Film & TV Festival announced its award winners for the 2025 festival, with “Crazy Rich Asians” writer Amy Wang’s film “Slanted” winning the top prize in the Narrative Feature Competition.

IndieWire’s review called Wang’s body horror high school film a combination of “Mean Girls” and “The Substance.” The film is seeking U.S. distribution.

The narrative feature jury, which included IndieWire’s own Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio, also gave Annapurna Sriram’s “Fucktoys” the Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate, while Amanda Peet won the Performance award for her work in Matthew Shear’s debut film “Fantasy Life.” Benjamin Flaherty’s film “Shuffle” won the top Documentary prize.

Neon also awarded a special prize to director Grace Glowicki of “Dead Lover,” which just picked up distribution out of SXSW after it initially premiered at Sundance.

Check out the full list of SXSW winners below:

The...

SXSW announced the winners of its film and television jury and special awards on Wednesday night, with Amy Wang’s Slanted earning Narrative Feature Competition honours and Shuffle by Benjamin Flaherty taking correponding documentary honours.

The Narrative Feature Competition Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate went to Annapurna Sriram forFucktoys, while Amanda Peet won the Special Jury Award for Performance for Fantasy Life.

In the Documentary Feature Competition Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt and Paige Bethmann’s Remaining Native earned the Special Jury Award.

Grace Glowicki, the director, writer, and star of Dead Lover, won the Neon Auteur Award...

Benjamin Flaherty spent three years shooting “Shuffle,” a documentary that follows three addicts who are trying to stay alive in rehab facilities that are scamming insurance companies. Flaherty reveals that patients are being bought and sold for their insurance policies and ushered into a cycle of care designed to keep them sick. With the help of an FBI informant, an insurance analyst, and the former executive director of a Philadelphia-based treatment facility, the director uncovers collusion at the highest levels of government.

Flaherty, who uses his personal journey of recovery from addiction as a way into the 82-minute doc, unravels a web of public policy and private interest preying on a desperate population for the sake of profit.

“I was only a few months sober when I heard a story about people being lured into sober homes for their insurance policies,” he says. “I was living in a sober home at the time,...

The International Documentary Association on Friday announced its latest round of grant funding. It’s providing a total of $245,000 out of two funds for 15 films, many of which are investigative works. The organization also announced its first class of Documentary magazine editorial fellows for a program meant to enhance opportunities for writers from underserved and underrepresented communities.

This year, 10 projects are set to receive $15,000 each from the Ida Enterprise Documentary Fund, which supports in-depth explorations of contemporary stories that into journalistic practice into filmmaking. The fund is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation.

Among them is “11 Questions,” the working title of the project from director-producer Cassandra Herrman, which is also getting funding from “Frontline.” This marks the first-ever joint-funding collaboration between Ida and the prestigious PBS series.

Herrman has been nominated for three News & Documentary Emmy Awards, most recently for...