2025 SXSW Awards

Joan uses a filter when she posts to Instagram to make herself look whiter, and the app’s maker gets in touch with an offer. Would she be willing to undergo a radical—and permanent—surgical alteration? “It’s a trippy idea that feels born from movies like Mean Girls, but with a dash of Cronenberg body horror flair,” writes Jenny Nulf in the Austin Chronicle. “Wang puts her whole soul into the film, and it radiates.”

The jury—Variety’s Clayton Davis, Vanity Fair’s Rebecca Ford, and IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio—gave a Special Jury Award for a Multi-Hyphenate to Annapurna Sriram, the writer, director, and star of Fucktoys. Sriram plays a sex worker looking to shake off a curse, and her directorial debut is “a grotesque odyssey through a place called Trashtown,” writes Esther Zuckerman at IndieWire. Fucktoys “allows Sriram to stake her claim as a filmmaker to watch, with a distinctive voice that mashes up rockabilly aesthetics with Tarot mysticism and an incredible dig at James Franco. This is the kind of thing you want to see at a festival like SXSW: Messy, but wholly original in its genre mashup.”

Amanda Peet has won a Special Jury Award for Performance for playing Dianne, a once-promising actress, in Matthew Shear’s directorial debut, Fantasy Life. Shear himself plays Sam, the considerably younger guy who falls for Dianne, but “the performance of the film is really Peet’s,” writes Angie Han in the Hollywood Reporter. “Hers is a fearless turn confronting head-on the everyday mortifications of aging out of showbiz (in one incident, she’s approached by a fan who turns out to have mistaken her for Lake Bell), the roiling mix of emotions under Dianne’s casually glamorous surface, the toxicity of her need, and her unwillingness to acknowledge it.”

Screen’s Tim Grierson, NPR’s Aisha Harris, and critic Jen Yamato—the jurors of this year’s Documentary Feature Competition—have given their top prize to Benjamin Flaherty’s first feature, Shuffle. What Flaherty “uncovers through three deeply distressing case studies—real people with real addiction issues—is that there’s a functional cartel of clinics, halfway homes, prescribers, and policy setters who have no interest in really solving the addiction epidemic as long as the Medicare dollars keep flowing,” writes the Austin Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker. “Shuffle is a brutal depiction of how a totally broken system starts to take on aspects of a criminal syndicate.”

Special Jury Awards went to Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt, which focuses on an annual contest to rid waterways in and around Florida’s Everglades of twenty-foot-long pests, and Paige Bethmann’s Remaining Native, a portrait of a seventeen-year-old solo runner whose training conjures memories of his great-grandfather’s escape from a boarding school for Native Americans.