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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...

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...

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,...