General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Cow (斗牛) (2009 film)

Cow (斗牛; also romanized Dou niu) is a 2009 Chinese black comedy war film directed and written by Guan Hu (管虎), starring Huang Bo (黄渤) and Yan Ni (闫妮). Set in a Shandong village during the winter of 1940, it follows an illiterate farmer who becomes the reluctant guardian of a Dutch dairy cow left behind by the retreating Eighth Route Army, and who must protect the animal from Japanese soldiers, refugees, and bandits after a massacre kills the rest of the village.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Guan Hu, who also wrote the screenplay; based on a novel by Zhao Dongling¹^•³
Premiere and release	World premiere September 10, 2009 at the 66th Venice Film Festival (Orizzonti section); Chinese theatrical release September 11, 2009¹
Runtime	105 minutes (some sources list 110)¹^•⁴
Setting	Winter 1940, a village in the Yimeng Mountains of Shandong during the Second Sino-Japanese War⁵
Golden Horse Awards (46th, 2009)	Seven nominations; Huang Bo won Best Actor (tied with Nick Cheung) and Guan Hu won Best Adapted Screenplay⁶^•⁷
Opening weekend	7.7 million yuan in mainland China, second place that weekend⁸

Spoilers

Plot

During the War of Resistance Against Japan, a group of Eighth Route Army soldiers arrives in the Yimeng Mountain village of Mamuchi accompanied by a dairy cow donated by international supporters. When the Japanese army approaches, the soldiers evacuate and entrust the cow to the villagers, who select its keeper by drawing lots; the young widow Jiu'er helps the down-and-out farmer Niu Er draw the winning lot, making him the unlucky "lucky one".⁹

After a Japanese sweep massacres the village, Niu Er and the cow are the only survivors. He honors his written pledge to keep the animal alive, fending off Japanese soldiers, hungry refugees, bandits, and a quack doctor, while the stubborn cow gives him endless trouble. The film shuttles between past and present through flashbacks that reveal Niu Er's courtship of Jiu'er and the terms of his promise, and Niu Er eventually names the cow after her.⁹^•¹⁰^•⁴

The cow's origin is explained in the film with a mock-documentary passage: it is a Dutch-bred dairy cow given by the Communist International, part of a batch sent to support China's resistance.¹¹ An AFP report at the Venice festival noted that the Soviet Union organized donations of cows from the Netherlands and Australia mainly to southwestern China and the Shandong Peninsula, and that the underlying story, drawn from Shandong oral history, is thought to be largely true.²

Production

Origins. Guan Hu first heard the story of a man and a cow surviving the war in 1995, and in early 2007 the Shandong writer Zhao Dongling brought him a short story, "The Story of the Eighth Route Army Cow" (《八路牛的故事》), published in Shandong Literature and later Fiction Monthly. In the legend, the cow entrusted to villagers by an evacuating Eighth Route Army hospital lived until 1959, and no villager ever killed it for food even during famine. Guan wrote the screenplay in about a month while hospitalized in September 2007.¹¹

Shooting. Production began in January 2008 in the Yimeng Mountains, shortly after the birth of Guan Hu's daughter. The shoot was planned for 45 days but lasted four months, producing enough footage, Guan said, to cut a 30-episode television series; at one point the production was down to 3,000 yuan and Guan put in his own family's money.¹¹^•¹²

The cows. The animal was the production's central difficulty. The crew used seven cows, each weighing about 1,700 jin (roughly 850 kg), and Guan Hu put on-screen credits for each of them, saying it was the first time anyone had given cows title credits because "they gave so much".¹³^•¹⁴ Different animals stood in for different moods: an agile, fierce cow for the暴躁 scenes, a docile one for scenes of following the farmer, and even a body-double cow.¹² Huang Bo, who spent his days feeding the animals to win their cooperation, said at Venice that it was his first time acting opposite "a great actress who weighs 1.7 tonnes" and that his co-star "doesn't listen to the director, and doesn't read the script".² Guan said the shoot consumed a lifetime's patience; to get the cow to lick Huang Bo's head on camera, the crew salted his hair with salt, sugar, and sweet-potato juice, and the cow's habit of yanking grass up by the roots left Huang Bo complaining of thinning hair.²^•¹⁴

Awards

At the 46th Golden Horse Awards in 2009, Cow received seven nominations: Best Feature Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Song Xiaofei), Best Action Design (Qin Haiqiang and Chen Guanlong), and Best Editing (Kong Jinglei). Huang Bo won Best Actor, tied with Nick Cheung for The Beast Stalker, and Guan Hu won Best Adapted Screenplay.⁶^•⁷^•¹⁵

The film was nominated for the Horizons (Orizzonti) Best Film award at the 66th Venice Film Festival.⁶ In 2010 it earned Huang Bo nominations for Best Actor at the 4th Asian Film Awards and the 10th Chinese Film Media Awards, a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Yan Ni at the Asian Film Awards, and a Best Actor win for Huang Bo at the 17th Beijing Student Film Festival, where the film and Guan Hu were also nominated.⁶^•⁷ At the 2010 Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema it won the Golden Wheel, cited for "the originality of the director's imagination in his use of small people and animals to underline the inhumanity of war".⁷

Reception and festival run

After Venice, the film screened in the Dragons and Tigers section of the 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival (its North American premiere), the 2009 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, and the 2010 New York Asian Film Festival, its U.S. premiere.¹ Its mainland opening weekend gross of 7.7 million yuan placed second, behind the state-backed epic The Founding of a Republic; the New York Asian Film Festival's program later described the opening as taking "ten million", a figure that differs from the 7.7 million yuan reported at release.⁸^•⁴

Critics responded to the pairing of black comedy and war. The reviewer for lovehkfilm.com called it "an accomplished and unexpected film about one man, one cow and a chaotic world at war" and praised Huang Bo's performance as a comic actor with genuine emotional depth, while noting that some plot details differed between cuts shown in Hong Kong and on the mainland.¹⁰ A Vancouver festival review praised the cinematography's use of the ruined stone village and mountain landscapes but found the story loose and meandering.¹⁶ A Bright Lights Film Journal review of the Vancouver festival called it "essentially a commercial black comedy" smarter than most mainstream Chinese war films, locating the film's strength in the emotional bond between Niu Er and the cow.¹⁷ Later commentary has placed the film within Guan Hu's black-comedy vein and read it as an examination of the relationship between organizations and individuals under extreme conditions.¹⁸^•¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026