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The 2024 Sundance Film Festival will honor filmmakers Christopher Nolan, Maite Alberdi, and Celine Song with awards at its annual opening night gala and fundraiser, the festival announced on November 1.
The fundraiser will take place January 18, 2024 on the opening night of next year’s Sundance, this year celebrating 40 years of the film festival. “Oppenheimer” director Nolan will receive a new prize from Sundance called the Sundance Institute Trailblazer Award. Nolan’s “Memento” from 2001 premiered at Sundance that year. Meanwhile, Song and Alberdi will each receive the annual Vanguard Award Presented by Acura. Their respective films, “Past Lives” and “The Eternal Memory,” each premiered at Sundance in 2023. Song will receive the award for Fiction, and Alberdi for Non-Fiction.
“As we step into the 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival, it is a distinct honor to recognize Christopher Nolan, a prodigious artist whose singular talent and remarkable body of work have made him one of the most respected filmmakers of our time. We are looking forward to spotlighting the unique voices of both Celine and Maite, storytellers we have been supporting and deeply believe in. All three of these storytellers represent Sundance’s values,” said Joana Vicente, Sundance Institute CEO. “From the Festival to our year-round programs, it is artists that have and always will be at the very core of what we do. We look forward to our guests joining us at the Opening Night Gala and, in turn, enabling us to continue championing independent storytellers and their art that adds great value to our culture.”
The inaugural Trailblazer Award will be presented to someone who demonstrates an “artist’s unwavering dedication and notable contributions to the field of independent film.”
“Presenting ‘Memento’ at the Sundance Film Festival marked a pivotal moment in my career, this award is a full circle moment and testament to the extraordinary influence of independent filmmaking,” Nolan said in a statement.
The Vanguard Award honors artists whose work highlights the art of storytelling and creative independence in both nonfiction and fiction. Past winners have included W. Kamau Bell, Nikyatu Jusu, Ryan Coogler, Siân Heder, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Radha Blank, Lulu Wang, Dee Rees, Damien Chazelle, Marielle Heller, Benh Zeitlin, and Boots Riley.
“I am incredibly honored to receive this award — it really means the world to me,” Song said. “Sundance is where I showed my very first film for the very first time, 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. Sundance is the place that launched my career as a filmmaker: it’s a home for ‘Past Lives’ — and a home for me — in the deepest way. Thank you so much.”
“It’s an absolute honor to receive the Vanguard Award. Sundance was the gateway to North American audiences for me and has been hugely supportive of my last two films,” Alberdi said. “I am enormously grateful that the narrative avant-garde is also understood as applying to documentaries and that filmmaking boundaries are continuing to expand. ‘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 and I am proud and humbled to be among such an extraordinary group of filmmakers who have been given this recognition including Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, Siân Heder, Radha Blank, Lulu Wang, and Nikyatu Jusu — amongst others whose work I greatly admire.”
Song also in 2018 participated in a cohort for the Sundance Institute Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. And Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” won the World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance. She also received a Sundance Documentary Film Grant in 2013 and 2016 and served on the jury for the 2019 Festival in the World Documentary Competition category.
The annual opening night gala enables the nonprofit to raise critical funds to support independent artists year-round through labs, grants, and public programming that nurture artists globally. The upcoming Sundance Film Festival will take place January 18–28, 2024 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, as well as online from January 25–28.
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– Armessa Movie News