Anecdotal evidence

December 05, 2006 There's no question that the biggest headline to emerge from January's Sundance Film Festival was Fox Searchlight's $10 million acquisition of the offbeat, uplifting comedy "Little Miss Sunshine," a sweetly cynical ode to individuality that the specialty distributor hoped would play in much the same way as its 2004 pickup, "Napoleon Dynamite," had. What no one could have imagined was that the film would earn, at press time, upward of $59 million at the domestic boxoffice and be a dark-horse contender for a best picture Oscar. [...] perhaps what is most interesting about the project in terms of current trends in independent cinema is the fact that not only did "Sunshine" have two directors, but one of them happened to be a woman, Valerie Faris.

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