Latest news with #LouiseCourvoisier
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘How to Have Sex' Director Molly Manning Walker Heads Up Cannes Un Certain Regard Jury
How to Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker will head up this year's jury for Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar. The British filmmaker, whose debut feature won the section's top prize in 2023, will be joined on the jury by French-Swiss director Louise Courvoisier, whose Holy Cow won Un Certain Regard's Youth Award last year, Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini, the 2024 ex-aequno best director winner for The Damned, Argentinian actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (120 BPM), and International Film Festival Rotterdam director Vanja Kaludjercic. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes: Sally Hawkins, Matthew Broderick, Martin Freeman Join Simon Bird's 'I'm Not Here' Dwayne Johnson Takes a Prestige Swing in First 'The Smashing Machine' Trailer 'Avatar: The Last Airbender in Concert - The 20th Anniversary Tour' to Take Flight (Exclusive) 'It's such an honour to return to Cannes as the President of the Un Certain Regard Jury,' Walker said in a statement. 'This selection will forever hold a special place in my heart. Being a part of it really changed my world. I can't wait to discover the films at the epicentre of new cinema. Right now more than ever I feel that cinema is so key to bringing us together and allowing us to feel, to connect with each other. To escape, wonder and learn about each other. I'm excited to go on this journey with the other Jury members as I know it will be one hell of an adventure escaping into these filmmakers' worlds.' The five-member jury will be tasked with awarding prizes for Cannes' main sidebar, which highlights emerging voices and formally adventurous work. Guan Hu's Black Dog won the Un Certain Regard prize for best film last year. This year's program includes 20 titles, and is packed with directorial debuts, including Scarlett Johansson's Eleanor the Great, starring June Squibb; Harrison Dickinson's Urchin, the first time behind the camera for the Babygirl and Triangle of Sadness star; and Akinola Davies' My Father's Shadow, starring Slow Horses actor Sope Dìrísù. The 2025 Un Certain Regard sections will open on Wednesday, May 14, with Promised Sky from Tunisian director Erige Sehiri. The 78th Festival de Cannes will runs from May 13 to May 24. Best of The Hollywood Reporter "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked 20 Times the Oscars Got It Wrong
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Holy Cow review – warmhearted story of smalltown teen turned champion cheesemaker
It doesn't get more French than a drama about cheese. Holy Cow is the feature debut from director (and part-time farmer) Louise Courvoisier; it's a social-realist drama that is the opposite of grim and miserable in its warm and often funny telling of a coming-of-age story about a teenager from a struggling family of comté-makers in the remote region of Jura. Courvoisier warms things up nicely with her idealism and optimism, and she gets brilliant performances from her non-professional cast, cows included. The opening scene features a calf sitting in the driver's seat of a car staring out of the window. Newcomer Clément Faveau (a poultry farmer in real-life) plays 18-year-old Totone, first shown at a country fair so drunk that he jumps on a table and strips naked. Totone lives with his dad, a cheesemaker who drinks heavily, and his wise seven-year-old sister; no one ever mentions a mum. Totone gets small-town kicks with his mates, riding around on mopeds getting drunk, until something awful happens. Left alone to look after his sister, Totone comes up with a daft get-rich-quick scheme to make €30,000 in a comté competition. How hard can it be to knock out a prize-winning wheel? Faveau gives an amazingly subtle performance; Totone doesn't say much but his fragility and complexity are all there, humour too in the little shrug of a shoulder. Also terrific is Maïwene Barthelemy, as a teenage dairy farmer Totone falls in love with – and steals from. In what might be the most tender line of the film, she tells Totone, not unkindly: 'Stop snivelling and pull your finger out.' Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature. After watching the intensive labour of the cheese-making scenes you may also complain less about handing over a fiver for a little chunk of comté. Holy Cow shows at UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April.
The Guardian
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The full comté: quest to make a semi-hard cheese is French cinema's breakout hit of the year
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. But actually it is rawer and more immediate. It is anchored in the predicament of its protagonist, Totone, who is left to provide for his younger sister after their alcoholic father kills himself driving – and the pent-up isolation and frustration of the French countryside presses in. Next to Marcel Pagnol nostalgia, the film is a heady huff of diesel oil; its French title, Vingt Dieux, is a local exclamation literally meaning '20 gods!' It was always Courvoisier's goal to cow-tip the stereotypes visible among what she dismisses as the 'annual quota of French rural films'. But bringing a crew into the region to film there was risky. 'It was very delicate because people from the Jura are kind of wild, because it's such a remote region,' she says in a Zoom call, her backdrop the stone wall of the farmhouse she shares with her parents and siblings. 'They're never in contact with people from elsewhere, so there's this distrust of anything from outside.' Added to that was Holy Cow's unfiltered approach: it loiters in the sozzled village fetes and demolition derbies that punctuate rural boredom, and focuses on the ne'er-do-wells and marginalised. 'I think most people in the region would have preferred if my main character was someone ambitious who takes over a farm and gives a flamboyant image of the countryside,' says Courvoisier. 'But instead I decided to talk about those people everyone wants to hide.' In doing so, she joins a recent cadre of French films with a more abrasive and complex take on the countryside, such as those of Alain Guiraudie, and 2023's Super-Bourrés (Super Drunk) and Chiens de la Casse (Junkyard Dog). Courvoisier got the Jurassiens onside by involving them as much as possible in the production, most significantly by casting local non-professionals. Lead actor Clément Faveau, whose performance is fantastically irate and determined, is a poultry farm worker in real life. After he initially refused the role, she worked on him until he accepted. 'That mixture of violence and fragility that was written on his face, in his eyes, was exactly what I was looking for,' she says. 'I think his personality isn't always easy for him or those around him to handle because he's really highly strung.' Courvoisier's attachment to the area isn't just academic. Like the rest of her family, she divides her time between artistic activities and working on the farm, which produces cereals only using animal labour. With a thick mop of wavy black hair, and wearing a Princeton T-shirt, she has the fresh-faced complexion of someone who doesn't solely spend their time in editing suites. In mid-March when we talk, the serious labour hasn't yet begun – but she's trying to get rid of nesting bees in the walls. 'You're detaching yourself completely from reality when you make cinema,' she says. 'So it helps me to have another activity that's satisfying and concrete.' Furthering the artisanal feel, Courvoisier's family – her 'pack', as she calls them – were also closely involved with the film. Her parents, who were touring baroque musicians before they were farmers, and one of her brothers composed the score; her other brother and sister did the set design. Despite the artistic background, Courvoisier didn't have a cinephile upbringing. With the nearest cinema 20km away, the family usually spent DVD evenings in front of commercial Hollywood fodder such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws. Strangely for a small independent film, blockbusters were what Courvoisier and her cinematographer on Holy Cow often watched for inspiration. Fast and Furious films were a point of reference for the demolition derby scenes. And as a way of getting round the difficulty of filming beds interestingly, she used what she calls the 'Magic Mike shot': a painterly juxtaposition of two lovers' faces. 'My influences aren't just cinephile or intellectual, but also mainstream,' Courvoisier says. 'It's interesting to work out how certain films attract such large audiences. Even if we're making something very different, I like to try and have that generosity.' By Jura standards, Holy Cow hit the big time: far surpassing box office expectations, it also earned two César awards, including best debut for Courvoisier. She thinks the film has created an excitement and a sense of pride in seeing the region's reality up on screen. And she hopes that, by pulling in both urban and rural audiences, it may get the metropolitan networks who control cinema more interested in provincial film-makers and their outlook. In any case, she is staying put. 'For now, I have no desire to go elsewhere. I need a mixture of fantasy and real life that I wouldn't necessarily find outside of the Jura's borders. It's my arena of cinema.' Holy Cow is in US cinemas now and released in UK cinemas on 11 April
