‘An American Pastoral’ Review: A Timely and Trenchant Observation of School Board Politics

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic As Democratic voters lick their wounds from an emphatic defeat in the recent presidential election, a film like “An American Pastoral” isn’t likely to bring much comfort, but it does offer an instructive, microcosmic snapshot of the obstacles they were always facing.

Meticulously tracing the arc of a school board election in the small, predominantly conservative Pennsylvania borough of Elizabethtown, this strictly non-interventional documentary by French journalist and filmmaker Auberi Edler offers no narration or commentary on a fraught face-off between ideologically moderate Democrats and a local Republican Party steered by far-right Christian nationalism.

Instead, Edler’s calmly watchful film — premiering in the main competition at IDFA, and sure to travel further on the strength of its sharp gaze and topical heft — trusts in viewers to see the national forest for the trees.

To many non-American audiences, the idea of school board elections being a party matter of community-wide importance — campaigned for and voted on even by residents with no children of schoolgoing age — might seem a curious one.