Once

John Carney's Once opened in 2007 and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song (Falling Slowly, by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová) at the 80th Academy Awards. The film became one of the most internationally consequential Irish-language productions of its decade and consolidated Carney, the former bassist of The Frames, as a director whose continuing engagement with the music-cinema register would extend through Begin Again (2013) and Sing Street (2016).

A Dublin street musician (Glen Hansard, of The Frames and The Swell Season, in his lead role) meets a Czech immigrant pianist (Markéta Irglová, also of The Swell Season) who shares his passion for music. Across what is broadly one week the two of them write songs together (the actual songs that anchor the film's emotional register, performed by the actual musicians themselves on screen) that express, in collective musical-songwriting form, what the two characters cannot say to each other directly. The original Hansard-Irglová songs (including the Oscar-winning Falling Slowly) became continuing folk-pop standards across the years that followed.

The film was made on a budget of approximately $150,000 across approximately seventeen days of shooting, largely on actual Dublin streets, with Hansard and Irglová playing themselves in their actual musician identities. The 2011 Broadway musical adaptation went on to win eight Tony Awards including Best Musical. The film's continuing emotional register, the central romance built almost entirely through songwriting, anchored its broader cultural reach.