Stop the Pounding Heart

Sara is the daughter of a goat-farming family in Texas. Her parents home-school their twelve children and organise their lives by the Bible. Like her sisters, Sara grows up learning that she should be obedient to men and keep both her emotional and her physical purity until marriage. When she meets Colby, an amateur bull rider, she begins to question the only life she has ever known. This is the last film in Roberto Minervini's Texas trilogy. The people in it are not professional actors but real people living their own lives, and the script was written after the shooting was finished. The line between documentary and fiction is deliberately blurred as a result. The film neither mocks this family's faith nor defends it; it lets Sara ask her own questions. It screened at Cannes and was named best documentary in Italy.