Cynthia Erivo of ‘Wicked’ fame brings star power to Sundance gala as a quiet filmmaking legend gets her flowers

Park City • Cynthia Erivo — who recently has received such titles as “Academy Award nominee” for her role as Elphaba in “Wicked” — wasn’t sure about the honorific bestowed on her Friday night: visionary.

“A visionary is someone who can see into the future, and I’ve never considered myself as a person who can see what’s to come,” Erivo said as she accepted the Sundance Institute’s Visionary Award at a fundraising gala at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley.

“I’ve been blindly following what I think might lead my path.” Erivo said. “I put one foot in front of the other, and keep chipping away at the road until I can reach a destination, and I’m lucky enough to be somewhere I want to be. …

“I don’t really think that makes me a visionary,” Erivo said. “I think it makes me determined and dogged and passionate.”

Erivo was the most recognizable person given an award at Friday’s gala but hardly the only big star in attendance. The guest list included actors Glenn Close, Olivia Colman, Joel Edgerton, Jon Hamm and Tessa Thompson — as well as soccer legend Abby Wambach and YouTube star Sean Evans.

The Red Spirit Singers, a group of Utah Indigenous musicians, performed to open the gala. Singer/songwriter/actor Sara Bareilles closed the night with a new song — from the documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — and “She Used to Be Mine,” which she wrote for the musical “Waitress” (which was adapted from a 2007 Sundance Film Festival movie).

The institute’s Trailblazer Award was given to writer-director James Mangold, whose career started at Sundance. Since then, he has made such Hollywood hits as “Walk the Line,” “Girl, Interrupted,” “Logan,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Ford vs. Ferrari” and last year’s Bob Dylan biographical drama, “A Complete Unknown” — for which he was nominated Thursday for three Academy Awards: director, adapted screenplay and (as one of the film’s producers) best picture.

Mangold urged other filmmakers to follow the Sundance model, to make movies that move people and are made with sincerity.

“When we are sincere, we do not make anesthesia. That’s something that we don’t need any more of in our world. We don’t need to make things that help people pass idle time,” Mangold said. “That doesn’t mean every film has to be a history lesson, or depressing or weepy or political or provocative or wear its issues on its sleeve. It just means that we shouldn’t be embarrassed to feel sh-- and show it.”

Before the gala, Mangold told reporters that he was attending the festival before he got to premiere his first movie, the drama “Heavy,” in Park City in 1995. The summer before that, he workshopped his second script, the police drama “Cop Land,” at the institute’s labs in Provo Canyon.

Sundance, Mangold said, has “been a launching pad for everything I’ve done, and for my taste, and for my own sense of what’s most valuable in cinema. … It’s been a place that welcomes my voice and has consistently welcomed me as a teacher, as well, for young people.”

The institute also gave Vanguard awards to filmmakers who introduced their first films at the 2024 festival: Sean Wang, who wrote and directed the coming-of-age drama “Didi,” and the directing team of Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, who made the Oscar-nominated documentary “Sugarcane,” which detailed abuse at an Indigenous boarding school in British Columbia — one NoiseCat’s family was forced to attend, and where his father was born.

The longest and most heartfelt presentation was a series of testimonials to Michelle Satter, the institute’s founding senior director of artist programs. Satter is credited with starting the filmmakers’ labs, and mentoring hundreds of moviemakers — including Mangold, Marielle Heller (who also spoke at the gala), Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kimberly Peirce and others.

Mangold took time in his own speech to praise Satter — calling Robert Redford’s move to hire her “the single most significant and impactful decision I think he’s made over many decades.”

Mangold called Satter “a divining rod for talent, a powerful advocate for film and filmmakers.” It is “immeasurable,” he said, how much the labs Satter and Redford started “have shaped the course of filmmaking — not just at Sundance, but worldwide, from the late 20th century to now.”

Satter was one of Redford’s first hires after he started the Sundance Institute in 1981. The hiring, Satter said in her acceptance speech, was her idea. After finishing a one-month filmmakers’ lab she organized at the institute’s first gathering at the Sundance Mountain Resort, Satter said she asked for five minutes with Redford.

“With all the confidence I could muster, I told him he needed me to open an L.A. office and help him fulfill the vision that he had created,” Satter said. “He looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘Sure. Call me when you get there.’ Right then and there, I learned quickly that when somebody says ‘yes,’ stop talking.”

Redford wrote a letter in praise of Satter, which his daughter, filmmaker and institute board member Amy Redford, read at the gala. Robert Redford wrote directly to Satter: “Michelle, you are a ‘yes’ person. You jumped in with no net. You understood the ‘why,’ and you were willing to figure out the ‘how.’ And you’re still doing that.”

Satter returned the compliment, calling her work with Redford a “true partnership and the adventure of a lifetime. We all wouldn’t be here without Bob’s extraordinary vision and his commitment to supporting creative expression and transforming the landscape for artists and audiences to engage with independent film.”

Satter was overseeing the institute’s January screenwriting labs just before the festival started, less than two weeks after she and her family lost their Pacific Palisades home in the wildfires that hit the Los Angeles area.

“It’s a deeply devastating time for us and so many others,” Satter said, “a moment that calls for all of us coming together to support our bigger community.” She quoted a friend, who told her, “Take a deep breath. We lost our village, but at the end of the day, we are the village.”