Webber & DeLia Launch Beyond Culture Production Company
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- Mark Webber and Jennifer DeLia have launched Beyond Culture, a production company integrating film, art, music, technology and experience, modeled on the 1919 founding principles of United Artists by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffith to give artists creative ownership and financial control.
- The company's inaugural slate includes four projects: Webber's Figments of Freedom, executive produced by global recording artist Sia and currently in post, starring Afia Fields, Eugenia Yuan and Winona LaDuke; DeLia's Mary Pickford: Love Wild, starring Sophie Kennedy Clark alongside Cary Elwes, Balthazar Getty, Summer Phoenix and Fran Kranz; docuseries Painting in the Dark about muralist Joel Bergner (aka Joel Artista); and the namesake reality-documentary hybrid Beyond Culture.
- The Mary Pickford project was marked by loss — DP Dan Kneece, whose career included collaborations with David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, passed away unexpectedly five weeks after completing additional photography, and actors Heath Freeman and Angela McCluskey also died before the film was finished; after a creative pause, the film has now entered its final stage of post-production.
- The Beyond Culture namesake series is a reality-documentary hybrid following Orange Is the New Black actor Taryn Manning alongside DeLia and Taylor Olandt through tantra, breath, mantra and sweat practices in what the company describes as a 'spiritual marathon of healing.'
- Beyond Culture will celebrate its launch with a panel, live performance and reception at the 2026 Toronto Film Festival as part of the Speakers' Summit Series, with Senegalese-American singer Marieme set to perform alongside collaborators from across the slate.
- DeLia and Webber's partnership traces back to Webber's 2008 feature directorial debut Explicit Ills, which DeLia helped finance and which won the Audience Award for Narrative Feature and Best Cinematography at SXSW.
Why it matters: Beyond Culture's explicit framing around the 1919 United Artists model — artist sovereignty over creative and financial control — positions the company as a deliberate alternative to studio gatekeeping, and the slate's range from a Sia-executive-produced war drama to a tantra-focused reality series signals ambitions well beyond conventional indie production. The Mary Pickford project's journey through the deaths of three collaborators before completion adds a somber weight to the launch that broader coverage of the TIFF event is unlikely to surface.
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