In the seven years I've been coming to Sundance, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a film so completely captivate the public and the critics alike as John Carney's Once, the Irish musical drama whose little-movie-that-could odyssey was completed Saturday night when it collected the audience award in Sundance's world dramatic competition. The selection of the film for the festival was largely the work of Sundance programmer John Nein, who saw a workprint of the movie in Galway last fall and then, as he explained during his introductory remarks at the first of Once's Sundance screenings, immediately set about convincing his fellow Sundance programmers that this was a film the festival simply had to show.
Fortunately, for the movie and for Sundance audiences, they agreed. But as I learned from speaking to the film's producers, before Once was selected by Sundance it had been rejected by several high-profile North American and international festivals, which says something telling (and unfortunate) about the kind of snobbery that can infect the festival selection process. The greatest of film festivals, I have always maintained, are those like Cannes and Telluride that choose their films carefully (instead of showing hundreds of movies à la Toronto) while remaining open to everything from the most popular Hollywood attractions to the most esoteric marginalia. Every now and then, however, a movie that straddles those boundaries — that is neither artsy enough for the art-movie ascetics nor mainstream enough for the multiplex crowd — gets thoughtlessly tossed to the sidelines. An extreme case in point was the excellent 1998 film Croupier, which was passed over by every festival and distributor in sight before finally landing in theaters two years later and becoming a strong word-of-mouth hit. Thanks to its Sundance success, Carney's film won't have to wait nearly that long to make it to a theater near you. But in the meantime, let this serve as a cautionary tale to festival programmers that even a movie with a title like Once sometimes deserves a second chance.
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