Xiaohui and His Cows
2022 · 15m · China
Directed by Xinying Lao
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A nine-year-old boy left behind in a rural Chinese village with his grandfather tries to stop him from separating their dairy cow from her calf — a fate that feels painfully similar to his own.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to reach for the obvious parallel between the boy and the separated calf, but Lao refuses the sentiment—there's something stubborn and unsentimental in how she lets the inevitability just sit there, which is exactly the kind of restraint that makes contrarians nervous and then converts them.
A precise work of visual metaphor that positions itself deliberately within the Chinese rural coming-of-age tradition while respecting its own formal boundaries; the specificity of dairy farming as both economic reality and emotional register shows a filmmaker thinking carefully about context and form.
The decision to hold the grandfather's face just slightly out of focus during the decisive moment—letting the boy's helplessness fill the frame instead—is the kind of small technical choice that transforms a familiar story about loss into something that actually lands in your chest.
Reviews
It must be heartbreaking for the mother cow to be forcibly separated from her child every year. I would try to stop the calf from being taken, and so would my protagonist, Xiaohui.