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.
