Daniel Bekerman attends the 2025 Canadian Screen Awards on June 1, 2025 in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo by Jeremy Chan/Getty Images) Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Any indie film producer can find themselves in the eye of a culture-war storm - but Daniel Bekerman got blown off course by the most powerful man on Earth. The founder of Scythia Films, a Canadian indie studio, recalls a valuable lesson learned when lawyers for Donald Trump began sending cease-and-desist letters in an effort to block the U.S. release of The Apprentice, the Oscar-nominated Trump origin story. "The current president is primarily in the entertainment business more than the politics business. Those letters were for entertainment purposes. You could tell by their lack of seriousness," Bekerman tells THR ahead of leading a conference panel on indie film at the Toronto Film Festival. Related Stories Movies Can TIFF's Content Market Compete With AFM and Cannes? Movies Why Cillian Murphy Swapped 'Oppenheimer' Bombast for Quiet Drama in 'Steve' Scythia Films - with offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Los Angeles - is one of Canada's largest indie studios. The company develops original features while also offering production services, assisting U.S. studios filming in Canada in a way that allows them to retain full ownership rights. In addition to The Apprentice, which stars Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong (both Oscar-nominated for their performances), Bekerman's recent producing credits include Guy Nattiv's Love and Light (working title), starring Lily James; Viggo Mortensen's directorial debut, Falling; Endless Cookie, which premiered at this year's Sundance; I Object, directed by Oscar nominee Andrew Niccol and starring Anna Faris and Karl Urban; and Close to You, directed by Dominic Savage and starring Elliot Page. Bekerman sat down with THR to discuss the potential - and perils - of independent filmmaking in a disrupted industry. You do original movies and are a key service production company in Canada. How have each of those businesses been impacted by increased industry disruption, including from Hollywood? We have these two sides of the business. One side is effectively the service productions, where we do the physical nuts and bolts of facilitating production. And the other is developing our own films. So we do both, and, especially for the creative side, it was important for us to have a presence in L.A. And you're based in Vancouver, where you can drive both sides of the business, original and service work? There's enough work for me to just stay in Canada, where I don't need to think about relocating and [designing] all my stories to being just from the Hollywood machine. It's always case by case. But what I do want to advocate for in general is having that diversity of storytelling and storytellers. If it's all being made by one source, whether it's a company or a government or anybody else, it's going to become thin after a while. You also in a sense have a third leg of the stool - international co-productions - some of which involve American partners. How is that impacted by our disrupted times? You're right to point out that third component, which usually falls under the original, creative producing side of things. Sometimes it's more like service production and a minority co-production scenario. But what's going on is very complex, but you can break it down to the simple principles of stability and instability of business. You can have instability in the business, or you can look for stability. And there's a lot of instability in the market. That's where international co-productions can come in and potentially offer stability with legislated agreements between nations that have consistent and fulfilled parameters for getting projects made. But these are not separate from the market entirely. They do augment other forces in the market. So having the ability to access the international treaty co-production system can be something of a remedy for the instability in the rest of the market. Making movies has never been easy. But do you find conversations to structure indie films just take longer these days, given all the industry disruption? I would say there's increased curiosity and interest in the these other systems, these international co-production systems, and the Canadian system. I'm paying attention to where the energy is. That's in the market and in the public consciousness because we're in the storytelling business. Sometimes we forget the source of our stories is the world. Right now, I find the institutional entertainment companies becoming increasingly conservative, increasingly homogenized. Their parameters for stories they're telling and how they're telling them are narrower, and increasingly they're trying to color within the li