Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: a journey like no other, funny and moving… of a cow!
Released in theaters in 2016, the exciting and touching comedy La Vache, produced by Jamel Debbouze (who also plays in the film), tells the extraordinary story of Fatah, a small Algerian peasant who only has eyes for his cow Jacqueline, which he dreams of taking to Paris, to the Agricultural Show.
When he receives the precious invitation in front of his entire astonished village, he who has never left his countryside, he takes the boat towards Marseille to cross the whole of France on foot, towards Porte de Versailles.
Fatah and Jacqueline will then go from meeting to surprise and experience a human adventure made up of great moments of mutual assistance and laughter. An unexpected journey full of tenderness in today’s France.
With La Vache, director Mohamed Hamidi wanted to make a road movie across France. Three elements pushed him to embark on the project. He was initially familiar with the French countryside after having been a leader of colonies.
The actor Fatsah Bouyahmed also told him about one of his uncles, who was passionate about agronomy, and who regularly asked him for information on the Agricultural Show, which he would have loved to visit.
Finally, Mohamed Hamidi was marked by the classic The Cow and the Prisoner as well as the road movies Little Miss Sunshine and A True Story.
With this film, Mohamed Hamidi wanted to sign a sort of fable with an induced and undemonstrated political aspect. The director sought, through this story, to show that individuals, wherever they come from, can coexist and share things despite differences in culture, social status or religion.
For animal casting, Mohamed Hamidi regularly went to the Agricultural Show where he saw hundreds of cows. His criterion in choosing Jacqueline was the following: the animal absolutely had to be brown to be credible as an Algerian cow.
Note that as he could neither take a French cow to Morocco (where the part which takes place in the Algerian village was filmed), nor a Moroccan cow to France, the team had to choose three identical cows, one in each country . As well as a liner, just in case!
The Cow, who sees Jamel Debbouze and Lambert Wilson opposite Fatsah Bouyahmed, was a great public success with more than 1.3 million spectators in attendance.
Tonight on France 3 at 9:10 p.m.
Behind the scenes of the filming of “The Cow”: