By Clayton Davis, Carole Horst, Payton Turkeltaub
Courtesy Images These up-and-coming producers champion diverse talents and storytellers, and will be recognized at the Bentonville Film Festival. The 12th edition of the festival runs June 15-21 in Bentonville, Ark. with founding partner Walmart, presenting partner Coca-Cola and a partnership with Variety’s Producers to Watch. While it seems like the current conversation around theatrical films is doom and gloom, these producers feel that if you can get a unique or original story on the big screen, audiences will show up. “We’re currently in a landscape that is so saturated with stories and hate to say it, content — so I feel like we’re all experiencing that industry shift. The swings feel bigger and a bit more volatile. But ultimately, I think in art and even in life, originality is all you have. I have to have faith that good storytelling and talent rises to the top,” says Taylor Shung, who is behind “Materialists” and “Late Fame.”
Adds Emily Korteweg (“Splitsville”): “When it comes to IP, we look for one of two things: either material with enough gravitas to carry genuine prestige potential, or a fresh concept — a clean, compelling idea you can articulate in a couple of lines. The question we ask is: What is the concept that is genuinely new, exciting, and strong enough to build around? “The films that are breaking through right now are the ones that demand something from the audience — that make them active rather than passive. That is not just one tone. We want to cut through, and above all, entertain.”
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Joshua Beirne-Golden
Image Credit: darv dayondon Beirne-Golden produced “Josephine,” Beth de Araújo’s coming-of-age drama that won over the crowd at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in U.S. dramatic competition. Sumerian Pictures picked it up for domestic distribution in a competitive seven-figure deal. Led by breakout newcomer Mason Reeves, 8, opposite Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan as her parents, the film follows a girl coping with a violent crime she witnesses in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. “Underrepresented voices are the ones I go to first,” Beirne-Golden says. “But there’s also just a spark to something you know when you read it, where you go, I have to help this get out into the world.” He adds: “Almost any film made by queer people, in a weird way, becomes a queer movie to me. Just by being present in your own experience, you’re infusing that into the film, no matter what you’re doing on the crew. I don’t think about it intellectually, but it informs every choice I make.” View on the marketplace: “There’s an extinction-event kind of feeling about the industry right now. But the more people feel like the old ways aren’t working, the more opportunity there is to try something new. It’s cyclical. When I started, I was getting hired to rewrite studio movies, and that business has basically vanished, and that was only 2012. A lot of things haven’t been working, but that means there’s a chance to do it in a way that does.” What’s next? “The tough thing about making something that really worked, that you really loved, is that now I want to find something else that feels like this. And that’s hard to do.” He is also developing projects for television.
—Clayton Davis
