'Same Moon,' Seen From Cloud Nine

At the first Sundance screening, the audience gave the film a standing ovation -- and clapped in time to the Tigres tune as the credits rolled.

"When I made it, I was always thinking of the Latino audience," Riggen says. "I never imagined that the American audience and the festival audience would embrace it like that. They were crazy. . . . I went to sleep that night thinking, 'Oh, by God, please don't let this be a dream.' "

Hearing the buzz, the studio people made sure to catch the screening the next day.

"I was just in tears," Nancy Utley, chief operating officer of Fox Searchlight, says by phone from Los Angeles. "You just want to go home and hug your kids. . . . It's a business situation, but you can't help but have a personal reaction to the films you see."

The Fox Searchlight posse tracked down Riggen in a restaurant that night, then reported to the condo for the after-midnight bargaining.

The film was screened for audiences of Cuban Americans in Miami, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos in the Bronx and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, as well as a "totally white-bread suburban" crowd outside Minneapolis, Utley says. Result: the highest test-audience rankings in Fox Searchlight's 12-year history.

Realizing they might have an unusual product on their hands, Fox Searchlight and Weinstein held the film back several months to figure out how to market it. Meanwhile, "Moon" has hit the festival circuit, from Toronto to Los Angeles to Chicago to Miami.

Attempts have been made before to tap the mainstream Latino audience but generally with films in English (think 1997's "Selena"). To reach them with a Spanish film and also capture the art-house crowd -- and maybe even mainstream English speakers -- is the marketers' dream.

"We are kind of participating in this grand experiment to appeal to the Latino audience and get them to come to our movie," Utley says. "And if we succeed, ['Moon'] would be the first one to crack the code of this audience."

The formula appeared successful at the Miami International Film Festival; after "Moon" showed there in February, a packed, diverse house of 1,600 stood and cheered. "The film is a bridge between Latino culture and American culture," says festival director Patrick de Bokay, who chose it because he wanted an opening-night film with "artsy" indie values as well as "broad audience appeal."

Still, it's not a sure thing. Notes Variety: "This stirring tale will be embraced most enthusiastically by Mexican audiences on both sides of the border, although breakout biz will depend on the Weinstein Co. and Fox Searchlight's success in selling the pic as the mainstream-friendly crowd-pleaser it is."

"Moon" is scheduled to open Wednesday in about 32 cities in more than 250 theaters -- art houses as well as mainstream mall multiplexes near Latino neighborhoods. The unusual midweek opening is to give families a chance to see it in the days leading up to Easter.