Stop the Pounding Heart

Roberto Minervini works with a crew of no more than five. He films from the shoulder, without extra lighting; each shot must be done in one take. Thanks to this sober, documentary-like approach, Minervini gets extremely close to his characters, always amateurs who basically play themselves.
In Stop the Pounding Heart, the final part of Minervini’s Texas trilogy, these are 14-year-old Sara and the slightly older Colby. She has been brought up in a deeply religious family of 14 goat herders. He comes from a less dogmatic family and wants to be a rodeo rider. Their cautiously blossoming puppy love is one of pure naivety, but launches Sara into a stormy identity crisis. The ideals she has grown up with are no longer as self-evident as her Bible-quoting parents taught her.
Moulded in a very realistic style, the film explores the religious fundamentalism, traditional gender relationships and conservative norms and values that shape life in rural America.