In Bucks, the suburban collar county, a series of high-profile culture wars in the post-COVID-19 years has included efforts to remove queer-themed books from school curriculum, a push to ban the display of the Pride flag in classrooms, contentious school board elections, and an even more tense run-up to the 2024 presidential race.
Starting in 2022, for more than three years, a group of filmmakers chronicled much of it, mostly in Doylestown and the Central Bucks School District, and some in the Pennridge School District. At the heart of the story are two teenage girls who maintain their close friendship, even as their parents took opposite political sides.
The result is a five-part documentary called Bucks County, USA. Its first two parts debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025, when the series was far from complete; even those first two episodes have been revised.
The series includes footage from contentious public meetings and talking-head interviews with a range of participants — from school board members to families with queer children, who all feel they have been adversely affected by the district’s policy decisions. It also includes scenes in which residents on opposite political sides discuss their differences.
Bucks County, USA, features plenty of Bucks County color, from a visit to an annual re-enactment of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware to Doylestown’s Oscar Hammerstein Museum, which, during the period of filming, was the subject of a fundraising campaign. We hear “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” a Hammerstein composition from the musical South Pacific, about the scourge of racial prejudice.
Filmmaker Robert May, who codirected the first episode and directed the other four, is a Pennsylvania native who now lives in the Poconos. The other codirector of the first episode is filmmaker Barry Levinson, whose work includes best picture Oscar winner Rain Man.
Both May and Levinson have previously made films about Pennsylvania scandals: May directed Kids for Cash, the 2014 documentary about a Pennsylvania judicial corruption scandal of the same name. Levinson directed Paterno, the 2018 HBO drama about the Penn State abuse scandal.
Jason Sosnoff, who has long worked with Levinson, is Bucks County, USA’s producer.
Sosnoff said the seeds of the docuseries were planted when he was invited to a focus group with Trump supporters on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot. The focus group was led by pollster and Penn alum Frank Luntz.
The producer came to the focus group with skepticism, but, he said, “I would say, about an hour into it, I started really hearing the people … I began to actually just hear and listen to them and see them as humans who have a point of view, rather than names and labels we give to them.”
He went to Levinson, his business partner, proposing that they start a project that would “humanize the right to the left and the left to the right.”
The next step was to find a community that could serve as a microcosm of that story and to ask, “Why is there such opposition now between the left and the right, Democrat or Republican, whatever you want to call it? Why is there such animosity in the air?” Levinson said.
The answer lay in “The School Board Wars,” a 2021 two-part episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily.The podcast examined the bitter political fights that had come to school boards nationwide, with the Central Bucks School District featured as an example.
“In that podcast, you hear people from the town screaming at each other, yelling at each other, death threats,” said Sosnoff, who thought, “Wow, this is a community that’s in trauma. And I think there’s a story there.”
He met May around that time, and they went to Bucks County, a crucial swing country in Pennsylvania where in 2024 President Donald Trump won by just 291 votes.
“What we saw in Bucks County was the possibility of using the school board wars and the school board campaign … as a narrative drive for the series,” May said. “These parents are all going to school board meetings, and they’re firing shots at both sides for the sake of their children.”
They started filming in April 2022 and continued through the end of 2025. Over that time, the filmmakers documented many school board meetings in which community members yelled at each other, wrote hundreds of angry social media posts, and battled over a 2023 school board election in which control of the Central Bucks School Board hung in the balance.
“They’re all protecting their kids, but they’re all fighting in front of their kids, too,” said May.
Two of those kids are Evi and Vanessa, who were 14 when the series started filming and remained best friends, even as their parents battled over political considerations. Vanessa’s father, Paul Martino, is a businessman who funded the conservative Back to School political action committee. His wife, Aarati, ran for the school board. Evi’s mother, Lela Casey, is a contributing writer to the local, progressive-leaning publication, the Bucks County Beacon.
The film team shifted its focus, in part, to Evi and Vanessa. The two teenagers were initially reluctant to speak on camera for fear of jeopardizing their friendship, but they ultimately did and remained friends.
It’s part of a repeating theme, May said. “The kids were a lot more civil with each other, and had a great deal of respect for each other, much more than a lot of the adults did.”
The filmmakers wanted to apply fairness to all sides and give everyone a say on camera. Winning the trust of some participants was hard.
“The conservative folks that we talked with viewed us as the media. ‘You’re making a movie, so you’re gonna bash us. We don’t want to be part of that.’ So it took a while to really convince them,” said May, who believes the team has been able to create a “nonbiased portrayal.”
The rancor has continued, nonetheless.
Bucks County Community College was set to host a local premiere screening of the documentary Sept. 15 but canceled it two days earlier. The screening instead took place that same night at a different venue: the Hiway Theater in Montgomery County’s Jenkintown, a Democratic stronghold.
In a statement provided to the media, the BCCC said the screening was canceled after “after we received information that raised concerns about our ability to provide a safe environment for campus visitors.”
“With the docuseries premiering locally on WHYY in less than one week,” the statement read, “and erring on the side of caution, the decision was made to cancel the event.”
“It is obviously unfortunate,” May and Sosnoff said in an email. “We had taken months to plan a great event at this location.” The entire point of the special screening was, they said, “to thank the community for their hospitality over the past four years, and in particular, thank all those who participated in our project.”
”Unfortunately, we live in fearful times, and while the school was not acting with ill intentions, they took something away from the community they are supposed to serve. Our series is all about community — how it can be built and how it can be destroyed,” they said. “Our goal is to foster more trust going forward.”
“Bucks County, USA” is available to stream via the PBS app, as well as The World Channel.
