These up-and-coming producers champion diverse talents and storytellers on the big screen, and will be recognized at the Bentonville Film Festival. The 11th edition of the festival runs June 16-22 in Bentonville, Ark. with founding partner Walmart, presenting partner Coca-Cola and a partnership with Variety’s Producers to Watch. This year’s festival lineup features 28 feature films in competition, including nine world premieres, curated by artistic director Drea Clark.
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Zainab Azizi
“Don’t Move”
Azizi says her films are like her children — she loves them all. But she’s particularly proud of Brian Netto and Adam Schindler’s “Don’t Move” (2024), about a grieving mother (Kelsey Asbille) kidnapped and injected with a paralytic agent by a seemingly kind stranger (Finn Wittrock). She got the script from manager Marc Manus and liked what she read. So she quickly assembled the financing, and six months later, she was in Bulgaria shooting the California-set thriller, which was eventually picked up by Netflix.
Part of the reason it’s dear to her heart isit that it gave her the opportunity to pay it forward.
“I was running the set with another female producer [Sarah Sarandos], and I bumped up her credit,” says Azizi, who also appears as Selfie Girl 2 in the movie.
Six years into her producing career with Raimi Prods., Azizi has already brought a large family of “children” into the world, including Iris K. Shim’s horror-mystery “Umma” (2022), starring Sandra Oh; Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ sci-fi adventure “65” (2023), starring Adam Driver; David Yorovesky’s psychological thriller “Locked” (2025), starring Bill Skarsgård; and production partner Sam Raimi’s upcoming deserted island survival drama “Send Help,” starring Rachel McAdams.
A native of Maryland, Azizi began her showbiz career in the mailroom at WME. Later, she was helping the agency package a film for Raimi — who’s directed everything from “The Evil Dead” franchise to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” — and he told her she should come be a producer for his company.
Back home, Azizi’s parents didn’t know what to make of her new “producer” job, so she told them it was like being a wedding planner.
“You understand what the concept is, and then you bring it to life,” she explains. “It’s all of these months and months of planning … and it happens, and then you just hope for the best.”
—Todd Longwell
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Juliet Berman
“Griffin in Summer”
Say what you will about “Carlito’s Way: The Beginning,” but it marked the start of Bergman’s producting career when she landed a production assistant role on the critically acclaimed prequel while still studying film at Columbia University.
“Stepping onto the first movie set and realizing there’s this huge apparatus and everything’s moving at a million miles an hour toward a common goal was so infectious to me,” Berman recalls.
After working for a studio exec, a TV director and an agency, she realized her future lay in independent films. “I wanted to be developing new voices,” she says.
She spent nearly 11 years as a producer and head of development at Treehouse Pictures before starting her own company, Spiral Stairs Entertainment, in 2023. She subsequently produced a remake of “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” and critics’ darling, the coming-of-age film “Griffin in Summer,” which won three awards at the Tribeca Film Festival.
“It’s hard to define what a producer is,” she says. “But that’s what’s rewarding, wearing a million different hats for whatever the moment requires. I love figuring out how to turn a no into a yes.”
A hands-on producer, Berman enjoys everything from development to post-production. “I love being on the set with the fast pace, putting a fire out and protecting the creatives,” she says.
That said, the only part she doesn’t love is packaging and sales, but even there she goes all in: “For ‘Griffin,’ I’m literally going to call the chains myself and pitch the movie.”
Berman is a proud member of Producers United, which she describes as working “to reassert the value that career producers bring to film and TV … It’s important to recognize how vital the producer is to the process.”
—Stuart Miller
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Jessica Choi
“Toy Story 5”
Choi started off her career at DisneyToons and DreamWorks Animation, before moving into visual effects on films both acclaimed (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) and not (“Cats”). She then joined Netflix’s animation division as a production executive “when there was 30 people and we grew into 1,200 with 30 movies on the slate,” which reinvigorated her love for the medium. Then Pixar reached out — one of the rare instances where the company hired from the outside — and Choi didn’t hesitate. “This is considered one of the best studios in the world,” she notes. “So, I had to go.”
Her first feature producing credit finds her starting out big with “Toy Story 5,” the latest entry in the blockbuster franchise, scheduled for release next year. Choi was excited to work with writer-director Andrew Stanton, noting, “I really wanted to challenge myself and work with someone that was considered the best.” She’s aware expectations are high. “Obviously it’s a massive franchise film and there’s a lot of eyes on it,” she notes. “But I feel like every film I’ve worked on has led me to kind of figure out what needs to be done on this one.”
Among her skills, Choi says, “I love connecting people. I love bringing everyone together and being on the sidelines for the creative of it. I think what brings me joy in my day-to-day is really just working with the team and having everyone perform at their best.”
—Jenelle Riley
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Thomas Hakim and Julien Graff
“All We Imagine as Light”
When Hakim and Graff launched Petit Chaos in 2018, their approach was organic. “It was a bit spontaneous,” says Hakim of their Paris-based production company’s origins. “I was developing projects and needed a structure to produce them. When I met Julien, he told me, ‘One day I would like to produce.’ And so I said, let’s do it together.”
The duo’s complementary backgrounds — Hakim’s on-set production management experience at companies like Geko Films and Why Not, paired with Graff’s seven-year tenure as CFO at Ecce Films — created an ideal foundation. “We had a similar vision about stuff, but also we could bring different skills and learn from each other,” Hakim explains.
Their instinctive decision-making has paid dividends. Both of Petit Chaos’s feature films began their journeys with major Cannes recognition: “A Night of Knowing Nothing” won the l’Œil for best documentary at Director’s Fortnight in 2021, while “All We Imagine as Light” claimed the Grand Prix at the 2024 festival competition. Both films are by India’s Payal Kapadia.
The company’s philosophy centers on genuine connection rather than calculated strategy. “It’s really about being moved by a film,” says Hakim. “The production company is a tool to be able to work with directors that we want to champion and that we want to actually be the first audience for.”
Both productions emerged from their relationship with Kapadia, whom Hakim met while the company was forming. “I fell in love with her work, with a short film, and the discussion started,” he recalls.
Named after a 1967 Rainer Werner Fassbinder short, Petit Chaos — which has produced 11 short films — operates on the principle that “it’s really the emotion” that drives their choices, as Graff notes. “What really moves us is the meeting with the director — it’s like meeting a human being at first and the project and this connection is the most important for us,” says Graff.
With projects including fiction features, documentaries, shorts and Kapadia’s upcoming films in the works, the partners continue building long-term collaborations.
— Naman Ramachandran
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Jesse Hope
“Rebuilding”
Growing up in Telluride, Colo., Hope was immersed in film culture early on. He started volunteering at the Telluride Film Festival at a young age and after college, worked on “The Hateful Eight” when it filmed in the town. He went on to work as a union special effects technician. Eventually, Max Walker-Silverman, Hope’s childhood friend and an New York University graduate film student, sought out his input. Hope ended up producing Walker-Silverman’s shorts, and the two cemented a producer-director partnership that has since resulted in the features “A Love Song” (2022) and this year’s “Rebuilding.” Both features are set in Colorado and were filmed in the state, where Hope and Walker-Silverman still reside.
Compared to “A Love Song,” which was a “small, scrappy film that came together in two months in the midst of the pandemic,” “Rebuilding” was a three-year process, Hope says.
“Rebuilding” stars Josh O’Connor as a rancher who has lost his property in a wildfire. The film, which premiered at Sundance in the wake of the L.A. fires, was inspired by Walker-Silverman’s own experience of losing his grandmother’s home to a fire. “What I loved so much about the project was that it’s a film that’s about climate change that managed to find a way to be hopeful,” Hope says.
Making the film involved creating “relationships with the local community.” To that point, the duo started a company dedicated to crafting “regional stories with a community-based approach to filmmaking,” Hope says.
While the shingle is in the midst of looking for projects. Hope and Walker-Silverman recently worked as producers on feature “Tomahawk Springs.” And since Walker-Silverman is back to writing, the duo is likely to team up again on their own project soon. “This is a business that’s built on building lasting, meaningful relationships and creative collaboration, and that’s just been something that’s been growing for a long time with Max,” Hope says.
—Abigail Lee
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Stephen “Dr.” Love
“The Land” “They Cloned Tyrone”
Love was 12 years old when he declared he wanted to be a movie producer. But as a kid growing up amid the cotton fields of rural South Carolina and with the closest movie theater an hour away. His path was forged thanks to an after-school program, where kids got to make their own short films. Love was naturally drawn to being the “team leader,” he recalls. “I remember asking the instructor, ‘What is this called the real world?’ And they said, ‘Producing.’ [I said], ‘That’s what I’m gonna do for a living.’”
He continued pursuing his passion for cinema through high school and college, but he also studied business, marketing and finance at Morehouse because they didn’t have a film program until he started a student society — for which alum Spike Lee eventually became an advisor. That was a formative relationship for Love, who learned from watching Lee navigate the business and fight to get his movies made.
Love made his dream a reality, producing five movies in the decade. He’s worked as a producer, including the Sundance-premiering gem “The Land,” directed by Steven Caple Jr.; the Netflix top 10 hit “They Cloned Tyrone,” a sci-fi conspiracy caper starring Jamie Foxx; and the Lionsgate action-thriller “Shadow Force,” starring Kerry Washington and Omar Sy, which hit theaters earlier this year.
“I only have two mandates on my slate,” Love says about his Made With Love Media banner. “One is to create the comp: I like the challenge of making a movie that’s absolutely needed for the audience, but it does not exist or hasn’t in a long time. The other is ‘sugar with the medicine.’ Narratives and storytelling can shift culture, shift politics, shift consciousness. I take that responsibility very, very seriously.”
Up next, Love will produce “Notes From a Young Black Chef” for A24 and, last summer, his team quietly — and independently — shot “That’s Her,” a rom-com starring Coco Jones and Kountry Wayne that hearkens back to “Boomerang” or “Brown Sugar.”
—Angelique Jackson
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Lizzie Shapiro
“The Plague”
Shapiro recently crossed off one of the key goals on her professional bucket list: bringing a project to Cannes’s main selection. She traveled there in 2025 with Charlie Polinger’s debut feature, “The Plague,” produced through her company, the Space Program. “It was a fever dream,” Shapiro says of being at the festival, where the film played in Un Certain Regard.
“The Plague” explores dynamics of masculinity and competition at a boys’ water polo camp. She remembers people reacting, “how the hell are you gonna make this movie?” Getting the film off the ground was a challenge: Beyond getting financed, the production navigated a location shoot in Bucharest, extremely hot weather and the logistics of teaching young actors to play water polo. “It was just all the skills I had learned leading up to one opus moment,” she observes.
Shapiro calls the Space Program, which also includes partners Gus Deardoff and Lexi Tannenholtz, a “filmmaker first” company. An NYU film alumnus, Shapiro developed her skill set producing debut features by Emma Seligman (“Shiva Baby”) and Annabelle Attanasio (“Mickey and the Bear”). She says that collaboration with first-timers often involves balancing “a certain patience of them going through their own learning curve and trying to help them get ahead of things that you’ve already learned from
past experiences.”
Her future slate includes “The Bear” writer Catherine Schetina’s film, “Pure,” and Pete Lee’s “kung fu adventure film” that’s an ode to San Francisco’s Chinatown. Plus, the Space Program is collaborating with Boots Riley on new projects.
“We’ve got the newcomers, and then we’ve got the more veteran slate,” Shapiro says. “But the important thing is they’re all things that I love deeply with my heart and can feel like I could put my full body and soul into.”
—Abigail Lee
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Trevor Wall
“Ponyboi,” “Slanted”
When Wall went to Cal State Long Beach to study film, he planned to become a director. That didn’t last long. “I quickly learned that’s not where my skill set lies and it’s not my jam,” recalls Wall, who recently served as producer on “Ponyboi” and “Slanted.”
Working in development at production companies stoked a desire to produce. Wall previously thought producers were “just the money people” but learned he could “see the entire process from beginning to end, bridging the gap between the business and art of filmmaking.”
He loves “working closely with writers and filmmakers,” saying this lets him “scratch my creative itch,” especially in breaking the stories with writers early on (then “they have the hard job of actually scripting it”) and in the editing room with directors.
“The key to a relationship with the director is trust,” he says, adding they’ll accept his creative suggestions if they know he’s supportive of their vision. When cost factors rear up, Wall gives his director options: “If you really want this we may have to pull something somewhere else,” he’ll say, and then let them decide. “I’m riding shotgun, navigating and saying, ‘Hey, there’s a road sign up ahead.’”
On set, Wall’s job shifts. “I’m basically a project manager or a walking complaint box. I’m putting out fires and managing situations to keep the show going, which can be equal parts thrilling and insanely stressful,” he says. “I’m learning to be at peace with recognizing that a lot of things, like the weather, are beyond my control, while realizing I need to be quick on my feet, pivoting and improvising.”
While “Slanted” is a slightly surreal comedy about ethnicity and “Ponyboi” a crime drama about an intersex sex worker, Wall sees a common thread. “They’re both about identity so they’re personal to me, being Black biracial and at the intersection of two identities,” he says. “A few of the other projects I have cooking also are about identity in different ways.
—Stuart Miller
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Zoë Worth
“Thelma”
Worth has always believed in fostering a creative community. As a student at New York University, she and actor Alden Ehrenreich formed a group called the Collectin to bring film and drama students together and collaborate on actor-driven work. “Calling it a ‘company’ would be generous,” she notes.
“I’d say we were somewhere between a collective and a club, with a bit of a support group thrown in.” The spirit of that group lived on when Worth moved back to L.A. and started a similar weekly workshop on the West coast.
It was there that she first met Josh Margolin, and years later, would read the script that would become “Thelma,” the 2024 Sundance breakout that turned June Squibb into an action star. Prior to “Thelma,” Worth produced and starred in features “Running Wild” (made for $20,000), “Shut Up and Drive” and the web series “Chloe and Zoe.” Though “Thelma” had a bigger budget, it was still an indie with challenges — shooting during COVID with a senior-led cast, for one. But the film charmed audiences and became Magnolia’s highest-grossing narrative feature ever. For Worth, it taught her “everything” and earned her a nomination for the prestigious Producers Award at the Spirit Awards.
Having formed the production company Bandwagon with fellow “Thelma” producer Chris Kaye, Worth is currently writing and developing a slate of new comedy projects, including Margolin’s next movie. And while her job as a producer is multifaceted, she stresses the creative side. “We purposely do not have a big slate because we are really more of an incubator,” she says. “We’d rather develop closely with artists than do a little on a lot.”
—Jenelle Riley
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Tony Yang
“Lucky Lu”
Yang was a pre-med student in college, following in his parents’ footsteps. But he had an awakening. “My junior year of undergrad, I just had this sudden realization that pre-med wasn’t the right path for me. I switched to film because I had always loved going to the movie theater growing up,” Yang says.
The year Yang switched, the new dean of the media school had the students make a feature-length film based on a play. “That was my first real hands-on experience with producing. From there, I applied to graduate school and was lucky enough to be accepted into Columbia’s master’s program for creative producing.”
By the time Yang had graduated, he had 50 shorts under his belt, across every department.
“Blue Sun Palace” (2023) was his first feature. As a producer, Yang says, “It means doing whatever I can to provide the resources, tools, guidance, expertise, etc. to the creatives that are the driving force behind the story so that they can operate at the highest level possible. Producing is about trying to elevate the people on set and make sure they are in a setting where they feel truly free to do their best work.”
Being a producer is also about being the rock.
His most recent project is Lloyd Choi’s “Lucky Lu,” a short film that Choi adapted as a feature-length film. The indie film, which bowed in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, was shot in New York City over 22 days.
Yang credits the “amazing team behind and in front of the camera” for helping pull it off. “Lloyd’s vision was precise from beginning to end and as producers, we had to step up multiple times to meet a lot of challenges head on. The support we received from the community, our friends and family, and our financial partners was crucial, and it was because of that support that we were able to do so without compromising his creativity,” Yang says.
—Jazz Tangcay