"I wanted to show the modern countryside dissected by roads, lorries, slip roads to join the motorway, hi-tech agricultural machinery with deafening engines… I was in love with Stévenin ever since I discovered Passe Montagne, and I wanted to make a film for him." 
— Patricia Mazuy

Developed with Stévenin in mind, Patricia Mazuy’s telluric debut, made when she was just 28, presents an alternative take on rural French life to that found in Passe Montagne. Whereas Stévenin’s film revels in a strange freedom found in escaping regimented urban life, Peaux de Vaches presents provincial France as a terrain of repressed violence and simmering resentments.

Opening with a debauched evening that ends in the accidental death of a vagrant, Mazuy’s film picks up ten years later when the brother who took the rap, played by Stévenin, is released from prison. Making an unwelcome return to his hometown in a bid to embed himself in his successful sibling’s family life, he develops an ambiguous relationship with his sister-in-law (Sandrine Bonnaire). Concluding with a sequence cherished by Jacques Rivette, Peaux de Vaches features one of Stévenin’s best performances and marks the beginning of one of the great undersung careers in contemporary French cinema.

This is the UK premiere of Peaux de Vaches.