(L–R) Evianne Casey and Vanessa Martino attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Bucks County, USA” at The Ray Theatre on January 28, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Lucy Spicer
Can we have a civil discussion?
That’s what Evi and Vanessa would like to know. Despite their opposing political beliefs, the two teenage girls are the best of friends, cherishing what they have in common and not allowing themselves to be pulled apart by what they don’t. Besides, the adults in their community are doing plenty of arguing without their help.
Evi and Vanessa live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a swing county within a swing state and the setting for the new five-part episodic docu-series Bucks County, USA, whose first two episodes are screening as part of the Episodic section at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. During the January 28 post-premiere Q&A at The Ray Theatre in Park City, co-director and executive producer Robert May and executive producer Jason Sosnoff invite some of the series’ participants — who include parents, schoolkids, teachers, and school board members — to the front of the theater before revealing what inspired the project.
“I heard [an episode] on The Daily [podcast] that was called ‘The School Board Wars,’ and in the opening of it, you hear all these sound clips of people at a school board meeting and there’s shouting, there’s cursing, there’s name-calling,” recounts Sosnoff. “You just hear this anger and this pain and this fear and this distrust in this community.” This cauldron of volatile emotions — displayed by grown adults who are supposed to be setting an example for their children — compelled Sosnoff to pitch the Pennsylvania county from the podcast episode as the subject for his team’s next project. Filming began in 2022.
“I just said, ‘There’s this huge wound here, you know? There’s clearly a trauma, and we need to go to the wound and just see what’s happening.’ We didn’t have a political agenda or anything like that. It was just, ‘What’s going on here?’”
“We’re living in a political world,” adds May. “The atmosphere in all our communities around the country, around the world, is already politicized. All of us are part of this. And so we didn’t want to tell that story. We wanted to find the human beings behind the sides so that we could present them to each other.”
The series’ human beings are certainly the ones doing the talking. We see them in interviews, footage of school board meetings, via social media comments, and more. And the juxtaposition of all their opinions reveals how much bitterness — and misinformation — is brewing among adults who not only are raising their children to hold their same views, but have more of a stake than ever in what gets taught in schools.
The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for the elevated contention in Bucks County. Frustrated with virtual education, some parents decided that getting kids back to in-person learning in schools should be their top priority. The results of the following school board elections would reflect this. But the single issue of opening schools didn’t live in a vacuum, and suddenly the school board landscape had changed, prompting fights about book banning, Pride flags, and more.
“Our whole process was to sit and listen, that’s it. We have a list of questions and it’s all planned and structured, but we literally just asked these questions and [sat] back and [listened]. And the thing that we found out through the course of telling this story is that that’s what’s been missing throughout our society now,” explains May during the Q&A. “Because if I’m talking and you’re getting ready to fire back, you’re not listening to me at all, you’re getting ready to tell me what you think. And when you’re talking, I’m not listening to you because I’m getting ready to fire back. So I feel like we’ve heard this from a number of the folks — that this is the first time that anyone didn’t interrupt them.”
Evi and Vanessa, who remain joined at the hip throughout the Bucks County, USA screening and afterward, are still pulling for civility and discussion even as we see their parents fighting with each other over social media. “I strongly believe in making connections between people, and I think that’s how change is made in the first place, by having open discussions regardless of party, especially within the youth,” says Evi during the Q&A. “Because we’re the next generation, so if we can learn to get along, then we can make more positive changes in the future.”
