‘Our job was not to attack’: how do you make a documentary about America’s culture wars?

Like many teenage best friends, Evi and Vanessa have a penchant for finishing each other’s sentences. Whether enmeshed on a couch or telling a story, one, a red-headed musical theater nerd with a personality nearly as boisterous as her signature puffy skirts, collides with the other, darker in hair and disposition, their speech bubbling with indecipherable affirmations and giggles. In a heady chorus of “duuude” and “no, you!”, it can be difficult to tell where one girl ends and the other begins.Except, that is, at their respective homes. Evi’s mother, Lela, who like her daughter, espouses views considered left of liberal in the US context, speaks in support of LGBTQ students at local school board meetings and advocates for fact-based history lessons. Vanessa’s father, Paul Martino, is a right-leaning venture capitalist who likes to brag about installing school board members by spending $500,000 on local campaigns, an effort triggered by what he saw as unjustified school closures in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.That their parents do not see eye to eye is an understatement; both are actively involved – on social media, on Zoom and in the meeting room – in lobbying their local school district board, and frequently call out the other by name. Like many towns across the US, the girls’ home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, an affluent district north of Philadelphia, has been roiled by the political and cultural currents triggered by upheaval of Covid-19. Seemingly overnight, concerns that simmered in various social media forums and side chats – the legality of masking, critical race theory, DEI, slavery, election conspiracy theories and viral fixations over transgender students and bathrooms – concentrated in perhaps the one unifying place in town: the school, and in particular its governing board, whose public meetings frequently ended in ugly shouting matches. Evi and Vanessa may open each episode of Bucks County, USA, a new five-part PBS docuseries embedded in one emblematically polarized town, in unison, but the adults, it seems, could not stop fighting.The series, directed by Robert May and Oscar-winning film-maker Barry Levinson, of Rain Man glory, and filmed over four highly contentious years, plays out a roving gallery of 2020s US politics in miniature – a “microcosm for communities around the country”, said May, where concern for one’s children morphs and mutates into hardline stances. Good intentions and, at times, bad information collide with pride in familiar, if fascinating and infuriating, stalemates. “We’re not trying to be political, to point fingers about this and that,” Levinson said of the dispassionate series, which gives many town-members free range to express their views. “We’re looking into what happened in an area that was almost idyllic – what threw us that far out of whack?”By the time the film-makers arrived in town in late 2021, inspired by a two-part episode from the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, the Central Bucks school board was already riven with conflict. Pushback to the district’s mask policy and Covid closures, along with Martino’s money via a Pac, fueled previously inconceivable attack ads and fake fliers. A new conservative majority on the board had turned their attention to certain books, which were either “grooming” children or LGBTQ-positive, depending on who was doing the talking. And talk people did, from parents to students to former teachers, from board members with pride bumper stickers on their cars to a parent speaker affiliated with Moms for Liberty, the Florida-based rightwing group that built an outsized influence on school boards across the country primarily via book ban campaigns.“We wanted to talk to people from both sides that really had a point of view,” May explained, letting curiosity be their guide to a true cross-section of the town’s ideological landscape. Interviews often began with personal questions and with promises to not interrupt, which were greeted warmly, particularly by conservative townspeople more skittish about a film crew. “It’s a rarity for someone to be able to speak for 30 seconds without someone firing back a counterpoint, and neither one of them then are listening to one another,” said May. “Our job was not to attack the person that’s sharing their opinion, but allowing them to share their opinion, to allow multiple sides to share an opinion and let the audience decide.“We know that there will be critics that will see this series, looking at someone that they don’t like, and they will say, ‘well, they were lying, and we should have told them that or called them out on it,’” he added when I noted the potential for false equivalencies. “And of course, if you have that point of view about it, you missed the whole point of the series.”‘We wanted to talk to people from both sides that really had a point of view. It’s a rarity for someone to be able to speak for 30 seconds without someone firing back a counterpoint, and neither one of them then are listening to one another.’ Photograph: SenArt Films & Baltimore PicturesThe team spent hundreds of hours filming in the town, anchored by Evi and Vanessa, who remained close even as Evi campaigned against the school board’s proposed ban of classroom pride flags, while Vanessa assisted her mother Aarati Martino, on the campaign trail for school board as an Indian-American former tech worker who viewed DEI as, in her opinion, a self-limiting mindset. “The idea here is to let people see these people as human, and then they can go out and determine what they know or don’t know about any particular issue that may be presented in the series,” May said of the long-term investment in listening and observing as views shift in real time.In its five hours, Bucks County, USA presents numerous avenues into the predominant culture wars of the decade’s first half, from book bans to transgender healthcare, DEI to vaccines. But though it is long on the many, many ways personal experience and emotions can crystallize into one’s politics, how baffling and contradictory and at times hypocritical all of us can be, it is short on compromise. What, after all, is the middle ground between a trans student fighting for acceptance, and a mother who believes said acceptance is “grooming” children? Or Martino, who argues “equity is not a fundamentally American principle”, and a Black parent who recognizes that “for someone to say they don’t want diversity, equity and inclusion … then to me, you’re saying you don’t want my family here.”There isn’t, really, though May and Levinson remain hopeful through the effort of trying. “We didn’t necessarily witness folks that changed their political persuasion or changed their political view, but we did witness people that agreed to figure out how to talk to one another and come together,” said May, particularly in a final series roundtable, after the first two episodes’ 2025 Sundance premiere, where both conversation and tensions flare. “You see it throughout the series – there’s an effort,” said May. “It doesn’t all get wrapped up in a bow by any means. But you can see the respect level go up.”“The idea is to be able to approach somebody and say, ‘I love you and I respect you. And I am curious about why you think a certain way,’” he added. Evi and Vanessa, now out of high school, suggest perhaps the only way forward: reciprocation. “We ought to be able to hear something and respond in kind and not try to accelerate it into left and right,” said Levinson. “Once you do that, you can’t work things out.” Bucks County, USA is available on PBS