Watching Auberi Edler’s new documentary, An American Pastoral, feels like listening to a conversation you weren’t supposed to overhear. This chilling film allows viewers to be a fly on the wall in small-town Pennsylvania in 2023, where four moderate Republican candidates resign from the Elizabethtown school board, giving Christian nationalists an opportunity to fill their seats. Edler attends local church gatherings, sits in on school board and book club meetings and tags along for neighbourhood canvassing, sharing intimate moments of residents’ lives.
The film’s main focus is the push to remove 2SLGBTQ+ literature from school libraries, yet it’s clear that the community’s issues run much deeper. The book ban is only a symptom of the growing divide between the far right and the rest of the town. Occasionally, we see residents trying to bridge this gap with dialogue, but the opposing factions remain mostly siloed in their own beliefs.
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Edler, a Paris-based documentary filmmaker who began her career as a war reporter, avoids structured interviews in the film. Instead, she allows the town’s residents to candidly speak for themselves. One resident shares that he answered Donald Trump’s call to come to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest the ratification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. He took his 15-year-old son to show him what “democracy and freedom look like.”
In a different scene, Tina Wilson, one of the far-right Republican activists campaigning for the school board, reveals that she was a Democrat not long ago. For her, “COVID changed everything.” She had harboured doubts about the Democratic party for some time, but forced masking was the final straw.
On the other hand, some Democrats have doubled down on their support for the party and its commitments. Freedom Readers, a book club launched by senior women in the town, reads only banned works as an act of resistance. “I can’t believe we have to do this all over again,” one woman remarks, recalling moral panics of previous decades.
While the school board election drives the storyline, the film’s most fascinating moments are the everyday interactions and conversations. An American Pastoral is a snapshot of small-town America and a microcosm of the United States — divided, fearful and angry.
Edler captures views from all sides of the political spectrum, but one group remains noticeably missing: the students themselves. When we do hear from them, we see them in the classroom respect-fully debating whether the right to bear arms should outweigh concerns about school shootings.
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An American Pastoral leaves the impression that the only people not talking past each other in the United States are the children. Their quiet presence in the film feels less like an omission than a reminder: those doing the least talking may have the most to say.
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This article first appeared in Broadview’s September/October 2025 issue with the title “Small-Town Takeover.”
Evgenia Shestunova is a former Broadview intern. She lives in Toronto.
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