Holy Cow

Louise Courvoisier's Holy Cow (original title Vingt Dieux, a Jura curse roughly translatable as “twenty gods”) is the writer-director's debut feature. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, where it won the section's Youth Prize and was nominated for the Caméra d'Or. Courvoisier grew up in the dairy country between Lons-le-Saunier and Champagnole and shot the film with a near-entirely non-professional cast drawn from the local farms.

Clément Faveau and Maïwène Barthelemy lead as Totone and Marie-Lise; both took home the Male and Female Revelation prizes at the Lumières. Cinematographer Elio Balézeaux works largely in handheld natural light, and the soundtrack is a mix of Linda Karshan-style ambient pulse and the rural French electro that the characters dance to at village discos. The 90-minute running time is unusually compact for a contemporary debut and keeps the comedy and the labour both close to the bone.

The film was selected as France's submission for César consideration and went on to win Best First Film at the 2025 ceremony, with Barthelemy named Best Female Revelation. Critics in Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif and Le Monde compared its loose, observational warmth to early Maurice Pialat and to Alice Rohrwacher's Italian rural cinema. Its low-key blend of teenage friendship, working-class economic precarity and slow-food-region pride made it one of the breakout French features of the year.