Amish Life Captured on Film & Print

Learn About Amish Life & Faith

If you want to understand Amish life before or after you visit Lancaster County, these two documentaries are a good place to start. Both feature scholars who have spent their careers studying the Amish, and both cover daily life, faith, work, and how the community is changing. Neither one is a tourist video.

The Amish: Back Roads to Heaven

The Amish: Back Roads to Heaven (2007, about 45 minutes). A documentary on Lancaster County’s Amish communities, covering farm life, family, schooling, worship, business, and the community’s response to the Nickel Mines tragedy. Features interviews with scholars Donald B. Kraybill and Steven M. Nolt.

The Story of Pennsylvania’s Amish Communities

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania hosts the oldest Amish community in North America. What emerges is a mosaic of Amish life and practice quite different from the common Amish stereotype.

Financial pressures have forced the majority of the Amish to forsake farming for more lucrative business enterprises. Business owners tend to adopt technology more rapidly than farmers, leading to a mini-industrial revolution. With more adults working in industries, family dynamics are beginning to change.

His interviews with authors Donald B Kraybill and Steven M Nolt provide uncommon insight into the Amish mindset. Experience Amish farm life, family life, business enterprises, childhood, school, worship, horse cultures, business practices. Extensive footage from an Amish barn raising. Includes Amish response to the Nickel Mines tragedy.

The Amish: A People of Preservation

The Amish: A People of Preservation (updated 2000, about 50 minutes). A documentary on Amish origins, daily life, courtship, barn-raising, transportation, tourism, land pressures, and cottage industries, with commentary from historians and sociologists.

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — The Oldest Amish community in America. An updated look at Amish origins, farm-life, childhood, school, worship, recreation, courtship, barn-raising, horse-transportation, tourism, land pressures, and new cottage industries.

From the back cover of this video: “The Amish, in the year 2000, keep surprising their technology-programmed neighbors by keeping alive ways and beliefs that many modern Americans wish they could recapture. In this colorful, updated documentary, Mennonite historian John Ruth takes us sympathetically into the Amish mindset. Dr. John A. Hostetler, author of Amish Society, comments on the survival of an alternative to the kind of world we have made. As the Amish increase in numbers, some of them migrate from homesteads in Pennsylvania toward more open farmland. Those staying where the land is too crowded to farm have developed an amazing variety of cottage industries. But all such changes are made very carefully, in order not to sacrifice spiritual covenant and community for the sake of convenience.”

American Film Festival: “…Visuals are strong and supportive of the purity and simplicity of the people it portrays. Full of gentle respect for the lifestyle it reveals. Succeeds in conveying an understanding of the philosophy of the Amish.”

Learn More

After watching, see Amish life up close at the Amish Farm and House, on an Amish buggy ride, or by reading about Amish beliefs, Amish history, and the Amish FAQ.