The man who made “Oppenheimer” and “The Dark Knight” — director Christopher Nolan — will receive an honor at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, as part of the Sundance Institute’s opening-night fundraising gala.
Nolan, whose films include “Tenet,” “Dunkirk” and “Memento,” will receive the institute’s first Trailblazer Award at the Jan. 18 gala at the deJoria Center in Kamas. The event happens on the first night of the 2024 festival, which runs Jan. 18-28 in Park City and Salt Lake City — and celebrates the 40th year that Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute has operated the nation’s premiere festival for independent movies.
Nolan, the institute wrote in a news release, “boldly pushes the parameters of cinematic storytelling.”
Nolan’s history with Sundance goes back to 2001, when he premiered his second movie — the amnesia-centered crime drama “Memento,” starring Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss — at the festival. Nolan and his brother, Jonathan, went on to win the festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.
“Presenting ‘Memento’ at the Sundance Film Festival marked a pivotal moment in my career,” Nolan said in a statement, adding that “this award is a full circle moment and testament to the extraordinary influence of independent filmmaking.”
At the gala, the institute will also present its Vanguard award — given to honor “artists whose work highlights the art of storytelling and creative independence in both nonfiction and fiction” — to two up-and-coming filmmakers: Celine Song and Maite Alberdi.
(Matthew Dunivan and Maite Alberdi | Sundance Institute) Filmmakers Celine Song, left, and Maite Alberdi are scheduled to receive the Sundance Institute's Vanguard Award, at a gala on Jan. 18, 2024, in Kamas, on the opening night of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
Both filmmakers premiered movies at the 2023 festival — Song debuted her romantic drama ”Past Lives”, and Alberdi won the grand jury prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition with ”The Eternal Memory.” Alberdi’s previous documentary, “The Mole Agent,” premiered at Sundance in 2020 and went on to receive an Oscar nomination.
“Sundance is where I showed my very first film for the very first time,” Song said in a statement, “and I will never forget the experience — pacing around the green room at the Eccles, waiting to introduce the film to the world, meeting the audience afterward, being there together with everyone who made the movie with me.”
Alberdi, in a statement, said, “Sundance was the gateway to North American audiences for me and has been hugely supportive of my last two films. ‘The Eternal Memory’ is a film that has taught me so much about the infinite ways of telling, looking at and working with real-life stories.”
It’s the second year that Sundance Institute has held an opening-night fundraiser gala like this. (Before the COVID-19 pandemic, it held a series of “Artist at the Table” on the festival’s first night.) Last year, the “Opening Night: A Taste of Sundance” gala honored directors Ryan Coogler (”Black Panther,” “Creed”) and Luca Guadagnino (”Call Me By Your Name,” “Suspiria”).
Individual tickets for the gala are $1,750, of which $1,545 is a charitable contribution. A table for 10 guests costs $20,000, and tables for $40,000 and $100,000 each are for nine guests to sit with a Sundance artist; other benefits are included. Tickets are on sale on the Sundance website, sundance.org.
