Screening Date: 30 October 2025
Screening Time: 7 pm
Release Date: 2024
Director: Louise Courvoisier
Country: France
Running Time: 92 mins
Rating: M
Language: French (with English subtitles)
A scrappy, big-hearted coming-of-age tale set in France’s Jura mountains, Holy Cow follows 18-year-old trouble-maker Totone, suddenly saddled with caring for his little sister and their failing dairy after his father’s death. His hare-brained solution? Win a regional comté-cheese competition worth €30 000—despite having no clue how to milk a cow, let alone craft an award-winning wheel. In between demolition-derbies, boozy fêtes and bare-knuckle barn dances, Totone discovers that grit, community and curds are messier than he bargained for.
It’s always dicey when a first-time director tackles rural realism; you can’t help wondering if quaint clichés will drown out authenticity. Will postcard pastures eclipse the pungent reality of cows, diesel and dashed hopes? In this case, decisively not.
Courvoisier—herself raised on a Jura farm—shot on location with non-professional locals, borrowed tractors and family-scored folk tunes, building a tactile world where mud sticks to the lens and characters reek of wood-smoke. When financing fizzled, cast and crew bartered cheese for catering and recorded dialogue in a cousin’s hayloft, the sort of seat-of-the-pants production that mirrors Totone’s gamble. The result bowled over Cannes, nabbing Un Certain Regard’s Youth Prize and later two Césars, including Best First Film.
More than a rural caper, Holy Cow is a clarion ode to under-seen France, interrogating pride, poverty and the back-breaking maths of farming in a globalised age. By the closing credits the film’s aroma of sweat, milk and resilience lingers longer than any whiff of sentimentality.
“Rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted—French cinema’s breakout hit of the year.” – The Guardian
