About Little Miss Sunshine
A dysfunctional family piles into a yellow VW bus to drive a seven-year-old aspiring beauty queen from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach for a pageant final. Sundance acquired the film for ten and a half million dollars in 2006 and a generation of indie comedies has been chasing the second half ever since.
Released in 2006 and running a tight 1h 41m, Little Miss Sunshine sits firmly in the comedy tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English.
Director: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Little Miss Sunshine is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Little Miss Sunshine
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Seattle, WA — listed at 4 independent cinemas.
- San Francisco, CA — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Barbara, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Scottsdale, AZ — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Arlington, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Lake Oswego, OR — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Kingston, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Marion, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Tempe, AZ — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Wilkes-Barre, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Little Miss Sunshine is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 41m comedy work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Comedy genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.