David Lynch, the maverick avant-garde filmmaker who died last month, is an inspiration for Daniel Bekerman, the plucky producer behind challenging indie films like “The Witch” and “The Apprentice,” that somehow bucked the odds to get made. “I can’t deny that I’m here for the art, and I want it to be as pure and true as possible,” Bekerman said in an interview shortly before this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “And I want to support bold visions from the directors I work with.”

But Bekerman, who founded and leads Scythia Films, also can’t deny that the business part of the entertainment industry often threatens to silence its boldest voices. That was certainly the case with “The Apprentice,” an incisive look at Donald Trump’s early years as a media-hungry developer which scared off studios and streamers who were worried about getting on the wrong side of the president if they bought the movie. And that was despite the glowing reviews that the film received. “We’re living in a moment where we are just seeing a mass capitulation to power by even the richest and most influential people and companies,” says Bekerman. “In corporate culture, there’s this mad dash to do anything people need to do in order to protect their bottom line. It’s profoundly disappointing.”

“The Apprentice” ultimately got a token release from Briarcliff Entertainment, a low-profile distributor, and had to endure a complicated sale after one of the film’s backers, Kinematics, which has ties to billionaire Daniel Snyder, opted to off-load its stake after reportedly being upset over the movie’s scathing portrait.

Bekerman doesn’t go into all of that. He insists he’s happy that the film got made at all, and he’s thrilled that its two stars, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, are getting awards recognition (both were nominated for Oscars a day after we spoke).

“It was worth it, even though we had to go through those hard times when we didn’t know if the movie would be released and we were having all this pressure,” Bekerman says. “But we were guided by the fact that we knew this was a piece of art that was culturally and politically relevant. We made something to stand the test of time.”

Bekerman hit Sundance with two new movies that are bold and uncompromising, if a lot less likely to land on Trump’s radar. They include “The Wedding Banquet,” a remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 rom-com about a gay couple who fake a heterosexual wedding to appease their relatives, and “Endless Cookie,” an animated documentary about the bond between two half brothers, one Indigenous, one white. Bekerman says “The Wedding Banquet,” which stars “SNL’s” Bowen Yang and “The Killers of the Flower Moon” breakout Lily Gladstone, “has its own unique voice,” and he promises that “Endless Cookie” has “all these wonderful, strange, magical occurrences” while telling a “funny and touching story.”

The films also represent the two sides of Scythia’s business. “The Wedding Banquet” is a “service production,” on which the company facilitated the physical production for a project that was created and fine-tuned by other filmmakers and studios — Bleecker is distributing the film. Whereas “Endless Cookie” was an original project that Scythia developed and secured the financing for while overseeing all elements of its production. Bekerman estimates that the company, which has produced the likes of Viggo Mortensen’s “Falling” and Roxine Helberg’s “Cold Copy,” is evenly split between the two types of projects. “One part of the business enables the other,” he says. “It lets us take risks.”

Next up is “The Eden Express,” an adaptation of Mark Vonnegut’s memoir about his experiences with bipolar disorder, as well as his time living at a British Columbia commune. 

“I want to change how people see mental illness represented in cinema,” he says. “That’s my goal with that project.”

As for Scythia’s esoteric moniker, Bekerman says it’s a reference to his family history. His father immigrated to Canada on an ocean liner with that name, and later built a boat that he christened the Scythia.

“I know it’s hard to spell and pronounce, but the symbolism of that is meaningful,” he says. “Naming it after a boat made sense because making movies, making art, telling stories, is an exploration for the storytellers and the audience. And the idea of my father, you know, as a kid, getting off a big ocean liner on the shores of North America and not really knowing the language, to me that sense of adventure and danger and promise and opportunity is something I want infused in the stories that we tell.”