Christopher Nolan is to receive a BFI Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed by the UK’s lead organization for film.
The award will be presented to the Oppenheimer filmmaker at the BFI Chair’s Dinner in London on February 14, 2024, hosted by BFI Chair Tim Richards. This will be followed on February 15, 2024, by an In Conversation event at BFI Southbank and a special introduction to Tenet at BFI IMAX, for which public tickets will be available. During the visit, Nolan will also visit the BFI National Archive’s Conservation Centre.
Nolan’s films have won 11 Academy Awards and grossed over $6.1 billion worldwide. The release of his latest film, Oppenheimer, in July 2023 took the world by storm, grossing over $950 million globally for Universal Pictures. The pic is Nolan’s biggest film ever at the UK box office, grossing £58.7 million to date, surpassing The Dark Knight and Dunkirk. The film had a rare second run in early November at IMAX cinemas in the US, making this epic the fourth highest-grossing worldwide IMAX release of all time. Oppenheimer will be showing at BFI IMAX again in January 2024.
Nolan commented today: “I am thrilled and honored to be accepting a BFI Fellowship from an organization so dedicated to preserving both cinema’s history as well as its future.”
BFI Chair Tim Richards added: “I’m delighted to be honoring and recognizing Christopher Nolan with a BFI Fellowship. Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of the 21st century, creating hugely popular movies that have grossed over $6 billion worldwide. His movies are all made for the big screen to challenge and entertain audiences around the world. Christopher’s commitment and support of the Cinema industry is legendary. He has also been at the forefront of preserving celluloid through his involvement with The Film Foundation and his own support via the Morf Foundation for the BFI’s photochemical work. All done to ensure that current and future audiences will be able to continue to enjoy and learn from our incredibly rich history of cinema for many years to come.”
Previous BFI Fellowship recipients include Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, Satyajit Ray, Tilda Swinton, David Lean, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Steve McQueen, Akira Kurosawa, Nicholas Roeg, Orson Welles, Ridley Scott, Ousmane Sembène, Bernardo Bertolucci and Souleymane Cissé.
