Between directing The World to Come and co-writing the Oscars sensation The Brutalist, filmmaker Mona Fastvold knows a thing or two about offering audiences gripping period pieces. From that perspective, when she returned to this type of filmmaking for The Testament of Ann Lee, it made perfect sense. Or, it at least made sense that she would be well-versed in those filmmaking methods, but making slightly less sense was her subject: Ann Lee, who led the Shaker movement of the 18th century. What does become clear when speaking with Fastvold, though, is that Ann Lee, like her other movies, is a jumping-off point to tell not only a period tale, but also to highlight how little about the world has changed in the last few centuries.
Fastvold first came across Ann Lee, who was played by Amanda Seyfried in the movie, while researching The World to Come, but while speaking with MovieWeb, the writer/director reflected on why she knew she had to translate this tale into a movie:
“Realizing that it was not just this fascinating story about this forgotten feminist icon, but it was also a story about movement. I think the physical aspects and the musical aspects of the story really … there was something there that I felt that was so cinematic and exciting. It felt like a great challenge, as well, to get to go into that world of movement and dance and then use that, my background in that, and then bring in my two close collaborators, Celia Rowlson-Hall and Daniel Blumberg to do this. I started writing really with the two of them in mind as well, so I think that’s when I knew that I wanted to make this into a film.”
Making the experience all the more ambitious and unconventional was how, based on the built-in nature that the Shakers, or the “Shaking Quakers,” earned their name for their jubilant worship, The Testament of Ann Lee has multiple song-and-dance sequences. As Fastvold described, “That was also the biggest challenge because I’ve never made a musical before. It’s such a tricky genre. I wanted to honor the old musicals that I loved, in many ways. I think there’s so many things that are so fascinating and incredible, but old Hollywood musicals or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or even if you think about Dancer in the Dark, or there’s contemporary musicals that I love as well, but it just had to be something. There was no [comparisons], there was nothing [where] I could be like, ‘All right, I’m gonna do it like that,’ because this story just had to be told in a very different way, even though it was gonna have music and movement at the core of it.”
These musical sequences weren’t an afterthought; they were baked into Fastvold’s script as she developed it. Despite how entrenched in the narrative these musical sequences were, Fastvold and her collaborators still found room for discovery:
“As I was doing additional passes of the script, after I had spent more time with Daniel and Celia, I definitely wrote in all of the movements and the musical parts … but we didn’t know exactly which hymns we were gonna incorporate. When I was working on the first draft, I had some placeholder hymns, and I had some different ideas and some Shaker poems and texts that were placeholders. And then we, Daniel Blumberg and I, just went on a deep dive. The Shakers left behind over a thousand hymns, so we really had to … we went on a deep dive into their rich musical history to find the pieces that we wanted to bring to life and then we had to bring into the film, and then there was a long process of adapting them and bringing them into our sonic universe.”
If you’re not familiar with the Shaker movement, or even know that it existed, you’re not alone. One core component about their belief system is being celibate, even after marriage. Understandably, this not only caused members to leave the community, but also prevented children from being born into the movement.
Incorporating the importance of song and dance, as well as celibacy, were key elements of Fastvold honoring the history of the Shakers. She also, however, wanted to maintain historical records, to the point that, when the film premiered, the credits confirmed there were only two remaining Shakers, but before the movie’s wide release, the number grew to three. Fastvold updated the credits accordingly.
Even with this commitment to reality, Fastvold knew there were elements of Ann Lee’s journey that she had to use her artistic license to depict in order to make a compelling experience:
“It’s important to me to honor her story, but no, as I’m telling it, I am an artist. I’m not a historian or an educator. All I can do is try to tell the story in the most compelling way, the way that I find the most compelling. And, hopefully, people will go and seek out Ann Lee’s story and they can fact-check it as much as they want, and they can say, ‘Oh,’ they can see where I took liberties. But I studied her and her story as much as I could, and the period and Manchester and the environments that we placed her in and that she lived in.
“From there on, I wrote from intuition. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: When you’re telling a story about the past, it truly – what it is and what it becomes is your conversation with the past, and that’s how you bring the present into it. It has to be this intuitive writing process for me, once you’ve done your homework, then I think it’s really up to you… and there’s so many holes, as well, in the story that I had to film.”
Telling a story like Ann Lee’s can be exhausting and tragic, though it is undeniably rewarding. And, for every person who watches the film, they’ll take away something different from this story, whether that be something inspiring or possibly something that might be a cautionary tale, given the consequences Ann Lee faced for her beliefs. Much like how Fastvold used The Testament of Ann Lee to have a conversation with the past, she also appreciates the conversations it’s ignited about the future.
“I think it’s been really nice and exciting to spend so much time talking about a different way of being a leader, of leadership, and talking about, what does it mean? What does female leadership look like or feminine leadership look like? What does leadership look like from a mothering perspective, from a nourishing perspective versus leading from a place of fear and intimidation, which is what we are seeing so much around the world right now. Getting to speak about that, that aspect of Ann Lee’s legacy – she led from a place with no ego and from a place of just wanting to create a community where everyone could worship and labor and dance and sing and live in complete equality. It was radical then and it’s still radical now.”
The Testament of Ann Lee is available on Digital now.
The Testament of Ann Lee
4.5
/5
- Release Date
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December 25, 2025
- Runtime
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137 minutes
- Director
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Mona Fastvold
- Writers
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Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
- Producers
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Viktória Petrányi, Lillian LaSalle, Sinan Eczacıbaşı, Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska, Joshua Horsfield, Andrew Morrison, Mark Lampert, Brady Corbet, Gregory Jankilevitsch, Mona Fastvold
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
