A Timely and Trenchant Election Doc

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. But Edler, a former TV newswoman with a keen eye for the social stakes underpinning banal local politics, swiftly establishes this seemingly small-scale event as a battleground for all manner of culture wars currently consuming the country at large, from LGBTQ rights to critical race theory to gun control. Cannily titled to reflect both the idealized ruralism and insistent Christianity of the right, “An American Pastoral” echoes the public-minded work of Frederick Wiseman in its uncovering of a community’s spirit via its town halls, church gatherings and administrative affairs.

Acting as her own camerawoman, Edler avoids interviews or any form of editorialization — the film even dispenses with onscreen titles to identify key figures and locations, instead letting viewers map out this geographical and sociological…