History remembers the Shakers - a millenarian, restorationist Christian sect founded in the 18th Century - for their minimalist design and craftsmanship, but rarely for their movement and the woman who dreamed it into being. In The Testament of Ann Lee, director Mona Fastvold sets out to correct that erasure, giving Ann Lee - the founding leader of the Shakers, born in Manchester, who later immigrated to America and built a vast following - the grand, embodied portrait she was never afforded. At the centre of this reclamation is Amanda Seyfried, whose performance carries both ferocity and grace.
What emerges is not a conventional biopic, but something closer to a cinematic ritual, where dance becomes prayer, music becomes breath, and the camera moves like a believer rather than a witness.
In conversation with Laura Stratford, Fastvold reflects on the urgency of preserving Ann Lee’s story, on the interplay between choreography, music and image, and on filmmaking as a symbiotic, collective act.
© 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved
Laura Stratford: This film! I watched it for the second time yesterday, and I want to see it again.
Mona Fastvold: That’s the biggest compliment. That’s what you want when you’re making a film, you hope that you create a world that people want to revisit. You want to have conversations about it, because it makes you think about something. Maybe you don’t even love it the first time or you have mixed feelings about it but then you’ll watch them again and kind of fall in love with it. The worst thing possible is someone saying, ‘Oh, wasn’t that nice?’ Laughs. And then immediately forgetting about it. So, thank you.
When did the figure of Ann Lee first enter your life, and become a creative obsession?
It was while I was doing research on another film I directed called The World to Come (2020) that I discovered her. I knew a little bit about the Shakers and their aesthetic and architectural inventions, but I didn’t know much about them at all; and I didn’t really know the difference between the Shakers and the Quakers, who have similar values but live more separately and practice a more quiet form of worship. I was interested in the 18th century and women and their relationship to religion.
My initial impression of that period in America was that everyone was part of a very strict religious community, but when I started reading more about it, I came to understand that there was this burst of new different and religious communities around the time that Ann Lee immigrated to America. So many people immigrated for religious freedom. After that, there was a bit of a religious lull where people became more separate, but I was fascinated by this sense of there being a ‘wild west’ of new, religious ideas; and then eventually, to discover this woman who presented something very different to a lot of popstar priests of the time - who had huge gatherings and would preach doom - who ended up creating the largest Utopian society out of all of them. Growing to over 6,000 followers!
I couldn’t believe it when I read that in the credits.
Isn’t it wild? So, I thought, wow, I really need to understand her story. I started diving into research and I found this great book by Richard Francis called ‘Ann the Word’ and then a similar book by Nardi Reeder Campion called ‘Ann Lee: Morning Star of the Shakers’ but beyond that, there’s not a lot that’s written about them. So I just dived into the Massachusetts Public Library and was in touch with the Hancock Shaker Village, who were advising me a lot through the process. It’s so beautiful, it’s like a living history museum. We actually ended up shooting little bits and pieces there after we finished our main shoot in Hungary.
Once you do all the research, it then has to become your story and you have to start thinking about what it is that you want to tell. What story are you interested in? And how is that a mirror to now, for you? Then the character starts talking to you and telling you which direction they want to move in, so you kind of have to start following your intuition. Ann Lee was illiterate, she never wrote anything down - so you’re relying on second, third, fourth person accounts of her life.
© 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved
There are these beautifully illustrated index cards which appear throughout the film, representing the chapters of Ann Lee’s narrative arc – from girl, to woman, to mother.
Yeah. I wanted to tell the story of her whole life. I was excited about that. I wanted to give her that sort of grand treatment. She deserved that.
Has anything stayed lodged in your mind since making this film?
A lot of this has. It’s exciting to look at history and to look at religion and to see this path of feminist historical figures; but this one in particular was about to be completely erased from history and reduced to some beautiful boxes and chairs and that’s that, that’s all we would have remembered about her, potentially. I’m not telling everyone to become Shakers but I do think her thoughts around gender and equality for all human beings, regardless of their age, their race, their background, their social economical background and how they should be treated with love and compassion and empathy… In the late 1700s? It’s radical.
Some of the more complicated parts of her ideas - like celibacy - for me, feel very much like a portrait of the time. If you had to witness your mother birthing eight children and then you yourself struggled to birth four children in your living room… Then, you know, you might feel inclined to celibacy, yourself. I could go on that journey with her and it wasn’t hard for me and Amanda to empathise with that decision, if you look at what she went through. Of course it’s complicated to impose that onto others but you know, if you as a woman then had zero autonomy, and if you’re considered your husband’s property… Sexuality, for her, was equal to pregnancy and birth and that was trauma; and that’s ultimately how women were losing their autonomy. So, I understand the journey she went on and of course, it’s complicated.
I also enjoyed telling a story about a woman where there was no sort of sadness or loss for not being seen as desirable or in a sexualised way. Ann Lee let go of all of that. Of course, it’s wonderful nowadays to see women who are sensual and sexual and beautiful and all of that but this film is a portrayal of a woman who’s deciding to reject any kind of sexuality, because she’s fucking done with it. Not everyone wants to hold onto their sexuality forever and their desirability forever. There’s something kind of wonderful and freeing about that.
Was there a particular element of Shaker culture that seduced you in a creative sense, that you knew you had to incorporate into this film?
Yes! Their architecture and design, obviously, which I adore - so beautiful. I was also very excited by the early beginnings of the Shakers, where they would have these wild, endless ecstatic prayer sessions - they were a little bit like raves. They would dance and make so much noise and breathe and sing and move for days and days and days, until the neighbours would call the police on them. So, for me, that was also obviously incredibly cinematic and exciting.
I loved the camera work. As a viewer, you feel as if you are right there.
You had to be part of it. That was important to us. We didn’t just wanna pull back and observe. We wanted the audience to feel like they were there with all of us, and for the camera to be a believer, not a server.
What did you learn from interpreting the traditions of the Shaker community through dance and music? The score and the choreography in this is striking.
Daniel Blumberg (composer) and Celia Rowlson-Hall (choreographer) are the most wonderful collaborators – I’m very close with both of them. I’ve known Daniel for over a decade. Celia I’ve known for nearly twenty years, we first met in 2005 or 2006 when I moved to New York, so we have a shorthand. They always surprise me and what felt different this time was having them both work together on this, as there was a lot of body movement and percussion and breath work and voice work. It was exciting when Daniel brought in these incredible improvisational singers and we had them working with the cast to learn how to use their voice in different ways. So, Daniel would work on a demo, which Celia would then work on and then I would send videos to Daniel of the dance and movement rehearsals and then he would start changing things based on what he saw, and send back another demo. It was this kind of constant back and forth between the movement and the music which was very, very interesting and a really enjoyable part of the process. We would say, “No, we wanna change the rhythm, the beat, here, it needs to change, here, or it needs to be faster or slower or this improvisational sound or breath, this motivating a movement, you know, for Celia’s choreography” and it was just so exciting to work in that way.
Symbiotic.
It really is. My whole crew, it’s all just one department, one band.
I heard in another interview how bits of the teaser you shot ended up staying in the film. Can you tell us more about that?
Yes, one of the very first things that I shot was Amanda singing the song ‘Stone Prison’, and then there’s a bit of choreography in this beautiful circular, barn structure. And then there were some other bits and pieces, simple architectural things, tiny moments, horses… I shot it on 35mm and it was really just our workshop process. Daniel had written ‘Stone Prison’ but he also had created another original piece for a movement workshop that we were doing with about 25 dancers in New York… We were essentially trying to build our language and start the process of finding our sound. And it was important for me to document that, so that people could understand the music and the movement, because it’s hard to get a sense of it when you read that on paper - which can feel a little dusty - or just by listening to a demo. It’s hard to understand just how radical the movement and music was going to feel.
Were there any parts of Ann Lee’s journey that didn’t make the film?
There’s definitely parts of her life, like the Manchester years, that I didn’t include in the story - it was just too much, and I didn’t think that the film should be four hours. There was also a lot more pain and suffering in her life. She was arrested multiple times and hurt and attacked and there were several rounds of being imprisoned and released again and threatened and beaten, all whilst she was in Manchester. The same happened again when they immigrated to America. During those pilgrimages, they were attacked multiple times and they would humiliate her and torture her and her brother, too.So I simplified the prosecution element because if I were to include all of the humiliation and suffering, it would have overshadowed everything else.
As you know, we’re all about celebrating female voices in film. Do you remember when you found your voice as a filmmaker?
Yes, because I was a child actor. I grew up on film sets. By the time I was in my early twenties, I was pretty done with it. I was still acting and modelling but I felt so tired of being in front of the camera; performing is a different personality. When I started directing - doing music videos with indie bands in Brooklyn - I remember feeling so at home and at ease. The love that I had for acting as a child was really about wanting to be a filmmaker but I don’t think I saw myself that way until I was older.
Well, it’s a real pleasure to welcome you to the collection.
It’s so great that you guys are doing this. It’s wonderful. Thank you for giving us a space and a place. There’s always been so much myth building around male directors so for me, it’s about reclaiming that narrative and sort of saying, well actually, there are incredible female directors who are absolute icons but they never had status… Like, it’s recent that people are speaking of Claire Denis in that way, you know? She’s a hero of mine.
The Testament of Ann Lee arrives in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 27 February
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