Holy Cow is a film about underdogs and a bid to make a prize-winning cheese, set against a rural backdrop of sozzled fetes and demolition derbies. Director Louise Courvoisier talks about shooting where ‘people are kind of wild’
Louise Courvoisier grew up the daughter of farmers in France’s eastern Jura region and, by the time she was 15, was desperate to leave this backwater. So she chose a boarding school 100km away in Besançon that happened to offer a cinema course. “I really needed to get out, for sure,” says the director, now 31. “But after my studies I needed to come back, and I had a new point of view. Leaving let me look at things differently and see what others don’t see. And I think that, without getting that distance on the region, I couldn’t have made this film.”
The film in question is Holy Cow, a rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted tale about one teenager’s quest to make a prize-winning wheel of comté cheese, a Jura speciality. The story appears to be comparable to the likes of The Full Monty or Brassed Off – British underdog comedies that Courvoisier admires for their social conscience.
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