The Sundance Institute on Wednesday unveiled details for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival’s opening-night gala on January 18 kicking off the festival’s 40th edition.
Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan will be honored with the first Sundance Institute Trailblazer Award, while Celine Song and Maite Alberdi — both of whom premiered films Past Lives and The Eternal Memory, respectively, at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival — will each receive the Vanguard Award.
The annual opening-night gala enables the nonprofit to raise funds for its labs, grants, and public programming. It launches the festival, set for January 18–28 in Park City and Salt Lake City and online from January 25–28.
The organization said the Trailblazer Award will recognize an artist’s unwavering dedication and notable contributions to the field of independent film. Nolan was celebrated by Sundance two decades ago when his breakthrough film, Memento, screened to acclaim, winning the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award on its way to an eventual Oscar Original Screenplay nomination. Memento catapulted Nolan’s career from independent films to blockbusters, including The Dark Knight trilogy and this year’s Oppenheimer.
The Vanguard Awards honor artists whose work highlights the art of storytelling and creative independence in both nonfiction and fiction. The Vanguard Award for Fiction will be presented to Song, who as a playwright she is best known for Endlings. Her debut feature Past Lives, which she wrote and directed, premiered at Sundance 2023 and was released by A24.
The Vanguard Award for Nonfiction will go to Alberdi, director of The Eternal Memory. She was the first Chilean woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for The Mole Agent (2021), which premiered at Sundance 2020. Alberdi has a long history with Sundance: she 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 Eternal Memory premiered last year at Sundance and received the World Cinema Documentary Jury Prize.
