The film's poster intentionally doesn't include Elder Banks so the audience doesn't know that he's a missionary when he's first introduced.
The writer/director/actor who made this movie: Richard Dutcher is known as "The Godfather of Mormon Cinema", as this movie inspired many Mormon-centric independent films to be made. However, Richard Dutcher had a faith crisis while preparing to make a movie about the life of Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith Jr, and left the faith and has largely retired from public life since.
One of the characters states that it's a "known fact" that there were no horses in America before Columbus. This is actually false. The discovery of the Hagerman horse in 1928, found in Idaho, proved that they existed in the Americas long before Columbus. Records from some Blackfoot Native American tribes corroborate this fact.
Sister Fronk says her three favorite books are John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", Leo Tolstory's "War and Peace" or "Anna Karenina", and Chaim Potok's "My Name Is Asher Lev". These books are also the favorite books of the film's director, Richard Dutcher.