Sundance kicks off Return to Personal Festival with awards for W. Kamau Bell, Ryan Coogler, Nikyatu Jusu and Luca Guadagnino + a dig at Armie Hammer

“I prefer to speak through my films,” Ryan Coogler told a packed audience at tonight’s A Taste of Sundance brunch.

It may be true for them Believe and Black Panther director, but as he accepted the first annual Sundance Institute Visionary Award on the first day of the 2023 festival, Coolger, winner of the 2013 Audience and Grand Jury Awards, certainly had something to say Thursday. “I was twice as nervous as I am now,” the filmmaker said at the first major event of his first personal Sundance in three years of his career, when he attended the festival founded by Robert Redford ten years ago. “I was nervous because I had a deep desire not to disappoint people,” Coogler added.

With the family of the deceased fruit valley Main character Oscar Grant sits in front of Coogler in the Basin Recreation Center, Oscar nominations likely Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and a Steph Curry documentary at this year’s Sundance, Coogler was far from disappointing anyone. “He’s quiet royalty,” Lena Waithe, fresh from London, said earlier when she presented Coogler with his award. “He is one of us and that qualifies him to tell our stories,” continued Waithe, who is a producer of this year’s drama One Thousand and One.

Today’s A Taste of Sundance event, which replaces the long-running Artist at the Table ceremony as Sundance’s inaugural event, may have been far from the snow-covered, well-trodden path of Park City’s Main Street, but it was straight into the mainstream of the 40 + year old shindig. In that spirit, Coogler was joined as honorees by fellow Sundance alumni W. Kamau, Nikyatu Jusu and Luca Guadagnino. The directors “We Need To Talk About Cosby” and “The Nanny” received the Vanguard Awards for nonfiction and fiction, respectively, while the director “Call Me By Your Name” received the International Icon Award.

In short conversational speeches to the audience tonight, the entire quartet reflected in their own way on how Sundance had just begun their careers. “I’ve been getting so many nos for so long, I thought no was my middle name,” the American Dramatic Jury Prize-winning nanny director frankly said. Jusu explained that Sundance made it impossible to ignore me and thanked the festival with “appreciation for seeing me clearly”. At times, Bell would revert to his stand-up comedian mode and be very serious as he told the gathering, “Our weirdness is our superpower.”

However, with veteran Boots Riley introducing Jusu and Roger Ross Williams and Bell, it’s a different form of weirdo, to say the least, that could be the takeaway from the well-cooked evening. Dakota Johnson welcomed Guadagnino to the stage and drew more than a few groans and a few cheers and laughs as she impliedly brought up the now-disgraced Armie Hammer’s alleged sexual misconduct.

“It was unfortunate that Luca asked me to play the role of Peach, but our schedules conflicted,” the A Bigger Splash star said on Sundance debut Call Me By Your Name. “Thank you, because then I would have been another woman who tried to eat Armie Hammer,” she continued about the suggestively used fruit of Hammer and Timothée Chalamet’s co-stars.

Johnson has come under fire for allegations of wrongdoing, which The Social Network star Hammer has repeatedly denied as his Hollywood career crumbled, and he can’t seem to let it go

“It’s been five years since this movie premiered here and Luca hasn’t stopped taking us to exciting places,” Johnson noted. “Who knew cannibalism was so popular?” the actress pointed out in a dual reference to Guadagnino’s 2022 carnivorous A Bones and All and Hammer’s alleged tendency.

In an evening of celebration of excellence, several opening films centered around the short Indigo Girls concert in Park City, which was very popular with A Taste of Sundance supporters, Jusu captured the essence of the honorees and the festival itself when she talked about her. impulse to communicate” – as you can see in the following video:

The personal Sundance Film Festival runs until January 29th. On January 24, most of the films from this year’s festival will be available online until the end of the month.

To paraphrase Aerosmith and Ryan Coogler, “Let the movies do the talking.”