Faveau’s performance as a teenage boy struggling to express his emotions is unshowy but fine-tuned.

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.

There is something conservative in Holy Cow, perhaps wilfully so: an evident pride in a culture that maintains its standards and traditions, and a feeling the film might not be so different if it had been made a few decades back...

This debut feature by Louise Courvoisier, who was raised in the Jura district of France where the story takes place, is unapologetic in its warm affection for rural life, yet her regard for the characters never becomes sentimental.