
Living Plain
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania is home to one of the largest Plain communities in the United States, where Amish and Mennonite families have kept horse-drawn buggies, plain dress, and farmwork rooted in generations-old practice. The film moves through the fields, one-room schoolhouses, and church districts of the region, observing how these communities have held onto their customs for centuries even as the world around them modernized. Interviews and everyday scenes, plowing, quilting, barn raising, communal worship, show the daily rhythms that keep the culture intact: the deliberate rejection of certain technologies, the emphasis on humility and separation from mainstream American life, and the tight social bonds that enforce those choices generation after generation. Rather than treating the Amish and Mennonites as a curiosity, the film stays close to the practical logic of their way of life, letting the routines of farming, faith, and family explain themselves. It is a portrait of a community defined by what it has chosen not to change.