The Your Script Produced! Faith-Based Screenplay Competition is a genre-focused screenwriting and talent discovery event designed to discover and promote underrepresented writers, directors, producers, actors, and filmmakers worldwide specializing in faith-based storytelling. It offers winners direct access to top industry players including United Talent Agency (UTA), with prizes that include tickets to the YSP Film Festival and Entertainment Finance Summit in Hollywood this November 2026.

The competition is open worldwide to any writer 18 years of age or older. Writers under 18 may enter with a signed parental or legal guardian consent form. There are no geographic restrictions — international writers are fully eligible regardless of their faith tradition or background.

Entering a faith-based screenplay competition like Your Script Produced! gives writers direct access to working industry professionals, talent agencies, and production companies actively seeking stories with moral depth, spiritual resonance, and broad audience appeal. Faith-based films have demonstrated consistent box-office performance and audience loyalty, making this a commercially strong genre that major distributors are actively pursuing. Rather than cold-querying agents, competitors place their work directly in front of decision-makers who understand the genre’s unique value.

Your Script Produced! Faith-Based Screenplay Competition is exclusively represented by United Talent Agency (UTA), one of the top three talent and literary agencies in Hollywood. Scripts are evaluated by active industry professionals — not anonymous readers — and winners gain access to a network that includes major distributors like Angel Studios, Amazon, Netflix, Lionsgate, and Sony. Grand Prize winners also receive complimentary tickets to both the Entertainment Finance Summit and the 1st Annual Your Script Produced! Film Festival in Hollywood, November 2026.

Each script is scored on a scale of 1 to 10 across seven categories: Story, Originality, Structure, Pacing, Characterization, Dialogue, and Commercial Potential. The competition advances scripts through four rounds:

• Quarter-Finalists: Top 20% of submissions
• Semi-Finalists: Top 10% of submissions
• Finalists: Top 3% of submissions

Winners are selected based on the highest cumulative scores from the judging panel.

The announcement schedule is as follows:

• Official Selection: September 13, 2026
• Quarter-Finalists: October 5, 2026
• Semi-Finalists: October 11, 2026
• Finalists: October 16, 2026
• Grand Prize Winners: October 19, 2026

Any writer 18 or older worldwide can submit. Writers under 18 need a parent or legal guardian consent form. Scripts must be original, unproduced work written in English, submitted in PDF (preferred), Final Draft (.fdx), or Microsoft Word format.

Yes. The competition accepts submissions across three formats — Short Films, Feature Films, and TV Pilots — each evaluated in its own category. Writers may submit across categories, with each submission requiring a separate entry fee.

Yes. The competition is explicitly open worldwide to all writers. Submission fees, rules, and judging criteria apply equally regardless of the writer’s country of origin or faith background.

Yes. Writers retain all rights, title, and interest in their scripts. The competition and sponsor are granted only the right to read and evaluate the script for competition purposes. No ownership is transferred through submission.

No. The competition requires original, unproduced work only. Scripts based on a real person’s life or an existing book require a written agreement from that person or the book’s author before submission.

Scripts must be submitted in industry-standard format. Accepted file types are PDF (preferred), Final Draft (.fdx), and Microsoft Word (.doc/.docx). Page count requirements by category:

• Feature Films: 85–110 pages
• Short Scripts: 3–30 pages
• TV Pilots: 25–60 pages

Scripts are scored 1–10 across seven criteria: Story, Originality, Structure, Pacing, Characterization, Dialogue, and Commercial Potential. All evaluations are conducted by active industry professionals — producers, directors, writers, and development executives. Decisions by the judging panel are final and binding.

Judges assess both the craft and the commercial viability of a faith-based script. Beyond strong dialogue and characterization, faith-based scripts are evaluated on the authenticity of their spiritual themes, the universality of their message, and their ability to connect with broad audiences beyond a single faith community. A script that scores consistently across all seven criteria — including Commercial Potential — is most competitive in this genre.

Authenticity is foundational in faith-based storytelling and directly impacts multiple judging criteria, including Originality and Characterization. Audiences for this genre are particularly discerning — they respond to stories that treat faith as a lived, complex experience rather than a simplified moral lesson. Scripts that portray spiritual struggle, doubt, and transformation with honesty tend to resonate far more deeply than those that present faith as uncomplicated or conflict-free.

Finalists represent the top 3% of all submissions, selected based on cumulative scores from the full judging panel. The path to finalist status runs through Quarter-Finals (top 20%) and Semi-Finals (top 10%), with each round narrowing the field based on total score rankings.

A winning faith-based screenplay scores at the highest level across all seven judging criteria while telling a story that is spiritually resonant, emotionally honest, and commercially viable. The scripts that advance furthest don’t preach — they dramatize. They present characters whose faith is tested, deepened, or transformed through the events of the story, delivering a message that connects with both faith-based audiences and the broader market.

Finalists receive a 15-minute guidance Zoom call with a member of the executive team or a producer. General feedback on all submitted scripts is not part of the standard competition process, but placement at any level — from Official Selection onward — signals a professional assessment of the work’s quality and commercial potential.

A faith-based screenplay is a script in which spiritual belief, religious values, or moral conviction play a central role in the story, characters, or themes. Faith-based films span a wide tonal and narrative range — from explicitly religious narratives rooted in scripture or church history, to broadly spiritual stories about redemption, forgiveness, purpose, and hope that resonate across belief systems. What unifies the genre is the presence of faith as a meaningful force in the characters’ lives, not simply as background detail.

A great faith-based screenplay treats its spiritual themes with the same dramatic rigor applied to any other storytelling genre. The best scripts present characters whose faith is genuinely tested — who doubt, struggle, and choose — and whose spiritual journey is inseparable from the dramatic arc of the story. They avoid didacticism in favor of dramatization, trusting the audience to draw meaning from the events on screen rather than having it stated outright. Strong structure, authentic dialogue, and emotionally grounded characters are the foundation.

Authentic faith-based characters are defined by the specificity of their belief and the reality of their spiritual struggle. Authenticity means resisting the temptation to make faith-driven characters uniformly virtuous or invulnerable to doubt — real faith, as audiences understand it, is tested. Writers should ground spiritual experience in concrete, observable behavior: how a character prays, how they make decisions, how their belief shapes their relationships and conflicts. The most resonant faith-based characters carry the weight of their convictions without becoming symbols or mouthpieces for a message.

Balancing faith, story, and entertainment requires treating the spiritual dimension of a script as dramatic material, not decorative content. Faith should drive character choices, create conflict, and generate consequences. The Commercial Potential criterion scored at Your Script Produced! reflects this balance directly: a script that is spiritually meaningful but dramatically inert will not advance as far as one that delivers both. The goal is a story that satisfies audiences as a film first, and as a faith-based experience through the authenticity and depth of what that film dramatizes.

The most common themes in faith-based films include redemption, forgiveness, divine purpose, spiritual crisis and renewal, the conflict between faith and doubt, moral courage in the face of adversity, family restoration, and the transformative power of prayer or community. These themes appear across sub-genres — from biblical epics and church-set dramas to sports stories, addiction recovery narratives, and family films with spiritual undercurrents. The strongest faith-based screenplays take a universal human experience and illuminate it through the lens of lived faith.

The most common mistakes in faith-based screenwriting include:

• Presenting faith as a solution rather than a journey, which removes dramatic tension
• Writing characters who exist solely to deliver spiritual messages rather than to live through a story
• Avoiding conflict or moral complexity out of concern for the audience’s sensibilities
• Neglecting structure and pacing in favor of thematic content
• Failing to demonstrate commercial potential — a dedicated judging criterion that reflects how essential broad audience appeal is to the genre’s continued growth in mainstream distribution

Prizes vary by category. The Feature Film Grand Prize winner receives a $500 cash prize, a 24-month option agreement ($500 upfront, $25,000 purchase price, plus 2 back-end points), development and packaging with Your Script Produced! Independent (repped by UTA), and promotion in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety at markets such as Cannes, TIFF, Berlinale, and the American Film Market. All Grand Prize winners receive 2 complimentary tickets to both the Entertainment Finance Summit and the 1st Annual YSP Film Festival in Hollywood — where Feature and TV Pilot winners are recognized on stage. Short Film and TV Pilot winners receive $250 cash prizes with comparable development and UTA access opportunities.

Yes. Winning or placing highly places your script in front of Your Script Produced! Independent, which is exclusively represented by United Talent Agency (UTA). All finalists have their work reviewed by the UTA-repped team, creating a direct pathway to representation that bypasses traditional cold query processes.

They can. The Your Script Produced! Faith-Based Competition is designed as a production pipeline, not just a recognition platform. Feature and TV Pilot winners enter active development and packaging, with option agreements that include compensation tied to physical production milestones. Winners are also invited to the 1st Annual YSP Film Festival and the Entertainment Finance Summit in Hollywood — where Feature and TV Pilot Grand Prize winners receive stage recognition and direct access to investors and production executives.

Competitions like Your Script Produced! provide emerging writers with industry validation, direct access to agents and producers, and exposure through trade publication announcements. Placement at any level — from Official Selection through Grand Prize — signals professional credibility that can open doors to representation, staffing consideration, and production meetings that cold outreach rarely achieves.

Yes. Your Script Produced! connects winners and finalists with the entertainment finance community through complimentary tickets to the Entertainment Finance Summit, where writers can meet investors and production executives. The competition’s network includes major streaming platforms and distributors — Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, A24, Lionsgate, Sony, Searchlight, Paramount, and Angel Studios — creating genuine exposure to capital and production infrastructure especially relevant to faith-based content.

For emerging faith-based writers without industry connections, competitions are one of the most effective ways to get spiritually driven stories in front of decision-makers who can move them toward production. Your Script Produced! specifically positions itself as a discovery platform for underrepresented and overlooked talent worldwide — and faith-based voices are among the most underserved in mainstream Hollywood development pipelines. Entering places your work where it can be seen, evaluated, and championed by the industry professionals and agencies needed to bring it to screen.