From award-winning writer-director Mona Fastvold (The World to Come, The Brutalist) comes the extraordinary true legend of Ann Lee, founder of the devotional sect known as the Shakers.
“Our film is a retelling of the life of the extraordinary true legend Ann Lee, one of the few female religious leaders of the 18th century. She and her followers, known as the Shakers, worshipped through ecstatic song and movement—trembling, exuberant, and physically expressive acts of devotion. I was raised in a secular household, and yet Ann Lee’s prophecies—however implausible—moved me deeply. Not because I share her faith, but because I recognise in her a yearning for justice, transcendence, and communal grace. Her radical pursuit of a self-fashioned utopia speaks to the creative impulse at the heart of all artistic endeavour: the urgent need to shape the world anew. In particular, her clarity of vision and ability to guide others toward a shared ideal recalls the collaborative spirit that underpins any creative undertaking—whether composing a symphony, building a building, or making a film. Each discipline is defined by the same striving: the search for moments of grace. For me, being an artist is always about striving to create the impossible — that’s what drew me to Ann Lee. This film is offered as a tribute to her dream — and the silence that now surrounds it.” Mona Fastvold, Director, Writer, Producer.
A Chance Encounter with History
While in production on her second feature The World to Come, award-winning writer-director Mona Fastvold stumbled on a vast archive of Shaker songs of worship from the Upstate New York area. She happened upon on a hymn called “Pretty Mother’s Home,” written by a freed slave who became a prominent leader of the Shakers, which inspired her to locate dozens of other Shaker hymns from the era and led her straight to Ann Lee and the utopian community she joined in 1758.
“I didn’t know much about the Shakers beyond their furniture design, which is what most people today know of the group,” says Fastvold. “In the beginning when they were the Shaking Quakers of Manchester, it was a place for people to explore religion in a different way, and I think this aggressive style of confession became a form of therapy. People who couldn’t fit into mainstream society were drawn to the Shakers because it offered a way out of the repressive and restrictive Church of England.”
“I became fascinated by Mother Ann’s story and was surprised no one had brought to light the story of this wild feminist religious leader in late 1700s America,” Fastvold continues. “She has been completely overlooked by history. Here was a woman leading a different kind of church who was espousing radical ideas while preaching tenderness and kindness toward others.”
Fastvold’s fascination with Mother Ann transported her into a unique spiritual era of revolutionary thinking. “There was a massive surge of utopian communities and religious groups around the time Ann immigrated to America in 1774,” says Fastvold. “In Colonial-era rural America, the landscape became a kind of mecca for reimagining what society could be—or shaping civilization to one’s own liking.”
Lee as a female leader became the central focus of Fastvold’s story, which she began writing with frequent collaborator Academy Award® nominee Brady Corbet (the two were nominated for an Academy Award® for writing The Brutalist). Divided into three chapters detailing the major transitions in Lee’s life, The Testament of Ann Lee begins with her impoverished childhood and coming of age in pre-industrial Manchester, continues through her immigration to America, and culminates with 1784, her death at age 48 after a violent attack on the Shakers the previous year.
The co-writers took an interpretative approach to Ann’s story. “A lot of what is written about Ann Lee is all conjecture and hearsay. We thought that the most radical thing we could do was take their testament quite seriously,” explains Corbet, “as opposed to deconstructing it with a cynical or very contemporary sort of perspective. We didn’t think that that was the most interesting way to go about it. Mona had such a strong sense of what this was before we sat down to execute it, that it came together pretty quickly.”
For Fastvold, that part of the process “always feels a little bit like a haunting or an exorcism,” she says. “Because you’ve lived with the story and these ideas for several years. And then when you sit down to execute it, all of a sudden these characters have an opinion about where they’re going and you just have to follow it, you kind of have to run after them and then get out of the way.”
Making a full-on musical was also a creative risk she needed to take, for Ann’s sake. “Amid the colossal struggle of her story, I found humor, audacity and determination,” says Fastvold. “I felt there was ample room within this historical biography for big gestures, bold theatrics, and operatic scale.”
Forces of nature: Mother Ann and Amanda Seyfried
Ann Lee grew up poor in Manchester, where she became an early adherent of the movement known as the “Shaking Quakers,” whose members were known for chanting and shaking vigorously during prayer sessions — a kind of ecstatic dancing believed to purge sins from body and mind.
Illiterate and with no formal education, Lee started preaching after losing her four children at a young age, insisting to her followers that they could attain holiness by giving up sexual relations. Despite her own marriage, she renounced gender roles, and marriage itself, advocating social equality, which made her a controversial figure in the eyes of the Church of England. Declared a heathen and placed in a mental asylum, Lee was said to have profound visions that led her to believe herself to be God’s representative on Earth and the female reincarnation of Christ.
Finding an actor to fully embody Ann was a major task. The role required many emotional and physical challenges, including singing and dancing while preaching to her flock and speaking in a thick 18th-century working-class Mancunian accent, for which there is no documentation or recordings, only literature and text.
Academy Award® nominee Amanda Seyfried was enchanted by the visionary religious leader. “The world doesn’t know what an incredible woman Ann Lee was,” says the actress, who was nominated for an Oscar® for her work as Marion Davies in David Fincher’s Mank. “Mona herself always has a strong vision, and her work speaks for itself, but her determination to tell Ann’s story in such a unique and original way was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. It’s essentially the origin story of the Shaker religion, which a lot of people don’t know about. I certainly didn’t know anything about Ann Lee before I talked to Mona.”
Seyfried had complete faith in Fastvold’s bold intention. “This was far from anything I’d read before, and I couldn’t fully envision what it might look like in terms of the singing and dancing sequences. But I trusted Mona, and I trusted the script, which I thought was beautiful. Did I trust myself in that world, playing with these new parameters of feminism and religious life? Not so much — but that’s always a good reason to do something.”
“From the minute Amanda began working on this role, she had a very intense connection to her character — she inhabited Ann Lee,” says Fastvold. “It didn’t hurt that she is a very unafraid actor, who located and supported the drive in the character and welcomed the physical demands, including singing and movement. She was always up for taking things three steps further than they were written on the page.”
Seyfried admired how ahead of her time Lee felt on the page and wanted to bring that alive in the movie. “While some of her ideas felt foreign — the celibacy and the idea that she was this vessel for all things holy who was being spoken to by God, the place of innocence and purity and goodness that it came from made for someone I wanted to understand on a deeper level,” says the actress. “What felt grandiose started to make a lot of sense, because sometimes we need rigidity and rules in life to make us feel safe. Ann also happened to be generous, passionate and selfless, and I came to see her as being grounded in who she was — especially after the trauma and loss she experienced at a young age. She’s very loving and generous and really believes in the best in people. She’s a rare bird and I think that’s why so many people wanted to follow her into the sun.”
Shooting in 35mm
As far as the look of the film, Fastvold was adamant about shooting on 35-millimeter film and blowing it up to 70-millimeter for maximum effect. “You want to feel the time period you are in, and I enjoy shooting on film because of the painterly quality it creates,” says Fastvold. “With 35mm, all the texture and grain and details — like the depths of the blacks when you light a room with candles — makes the picture look like a Caravaggio. Our director of photography William Rexer did a brilliant job; it’s fun to create this fantasy of time-travel and climbing into a painting from the period in which the movie is set.”
For Rexer, deciding what type of film to use was the big question in the beginning. “70 wasn’t going to be practical, the cameras are too noisy,” he says. “And we just knew it was going to be very hard and unwieldy to use 70 for the dance numbers and we also wanted to record so much of the singing live. We needed quiet cameras, so that’s another reason we went with 35.”
The cinematographer feels there’s an alchemy with film. “And for a project about a woman who was all about alchemy, there’s nothing more appropriate,” he says. “There’s a formality to film, even the way we slate, the fact that there’s 10 minutes on the roll and everyone knew that we had a limited budget. It’s precious — the rehearsal time, the performance, they know every minute is important and they treat it as such.”
Ann Lee’s lasting legacy
The Shaker sect grew — first in England and then in America, because its adherents, standing in rigid defiance to the evangelical Church of England, loved confessing their sins in the form of ecstatic movements pioneered by Lee.
The Shakers stopped converting adults in the late 1800s; at the peak of their movement prior to the Civil War, there were 6,000 members. As of 2025, only three practicing Shakers exist – they all reside at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. This is the last active Shaker community in the World.
“The Shakers were ahead of their time in terms of their maternal and brotherly-sisterly approach to co-existing together,” says Fastvold. “The social equality aspect of the movement lives on today, to say nothing of the Shaker aesthetic in building and furniture design — the beauty of its simplicity, making something that can last forever. Ann’s legacy lies in the radical pursuit of trying, and believing in, your vision — something any artist working with limited resources can relate to.”
Seyfried remains fascinated by Ann and The Shakers’ imperfect but inspiring ideals. “It was a utopia of sorts to a lot of people. Everybody was equal, everybody had a job. They prayed all the time and made everything that they could possibly need,” she marvels. “They were completely self-reliant and they maintained that for centuries. Mother Ann shows us how community can save us, how we are not here to live our lives on our own path, but to protect and support others. It’s fascinating, inspiring and it’s beautiful in its purity.”
Mona Fastvold – Director, Writer, Producer
Mona Fastvold is an Academy Award® nominated director / writer, based in New York and Oslo. She made her directorial debut in 2012 with The Sleepwalker, which went on to premiere at Sundance in U.S. competition. The Sleepwalker was co-written by Brady Corbet (who also starred). Corbet and Fastvold continued their close collaboration with The Childhood of a Leader, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won Best Director and Best First Feature, and earned Fastvold an Independent Spirit Award Nomination.
Fastvold frequently writes for and in collaboration with several directors, including Brady Corbet and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. She co-wrote The Brutalist with Corbet, which premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival winning the Silver Lion Award. The Brutalist was nominated for ten Academy Awards®, including Best Original Screenplay for Fastvold and Corbet (winning the Academy Award® for Best Actor, Best Original Score, and Best Cinematography), nine BAFTA Awards (winning Best Director, Best Actor, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score), and seven Golden Globes®, including Best Screenplay – Motion Picture for Fastvold and Corbet, (winning Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director – Motion Picture, Best Actor – Motion Picture – Drama).
Fastvold directed her second feature The World to Come, starring Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby. The acclaimed film premiered in official competition at the 2020 Venice Film Festival. Fastvold is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.
BRADY CORBET – Writer
Brady Corbet is a writer, director and actor. Brady made his feature directorial debut in 2015 with The Childhood of a Leader, starring Academy Award® nominee Bérénice Bejo and Robert Pattinson. The film was lauded with critical acclaim and decorated at the Venice Film Festival with the Orrizonti Best Director Award and Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Film.
His previous directing effort was the short film Protect You + Me, which won an award at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and was shot by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji. His second feature film, Vox Lux, starring Academy Award® Winner Natalie Portman and Academy Award® Nominee Jude Law was hailed by critics after it premiered in competition at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, London Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival.
Corbet directed and co-wrote the BAFTA, Golden Globe® and Academy Award® winning film The Brutalist, starring Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody, Academy Award® nominee Felicity Jones and Academy Award® nominee Guy Pearce. The film was received with universal acclaim at the 2024 Venice Film Festival in competition, winning the Silver Lion Award for Best Director.
As an actor, Corbet has worked with world class filmmakers such as Michael Haneke, Olivier Assayas, Ruben Östlund, Noah Baumbach, Lars Von Trier, Gregg Araki, Lisa Cholodenko and Antonio Campos, among many others.
DANIEL BLUMBERG – Composer
Daniel Blumberg is a London-based composer and artist. He is best known for his Academy Award® and BAFTA winning score for The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet, 2024). He also composed music for the forthcoming film Sotto Le Nuvole (dir. Gianfranco Rosi). He has released three solo albums on Mute and is a visual artist who draws with silverpoint.
WILLIAM REXER, ASC – Director of Photography
William Rexer, ASC is a director of photography of feature films, tv series, commercials, documentaries, and music videos. He is represented by The Gersh Agency.
Currently, he is finishing post on the film The Family McMullen, directed by Ed Burns. His most recent work includes Millers in Marriage by Ed Burns.; Long Bright River with Amanda Seyfried; The Crowded Room with Tom Holland; and Ryan Murphy’s “Halston” with Ewan McGregor; Jordan Peeles’s “Hunters”, season 1 and 2 with Al Pacino; “The Loudest Voice” with Russell Crowe, Siena Miller and Naomi Watts; “The Tick”; Ed Burn’s “Public Morals”; and “The Get Down” for Baz Luhrmann.
His previous feature films include: Under Blue Suburban Skies, by Ed Burns; Friends with Kids, directed by Jennifer Westfeldt; Ceremony, by Max Winkler; The Accidental Husband, directed by Griffin Dunne; I Think I Love My Wife, directed by Chris Rock; Prime, directed by Ben Younger; Griffin Dunne’s Fierce People; and Ed Burn’s Newlyweds.
His camera work includes participation in such films as Martin Scorsese’s Il Mio Viaggio in Italia and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. His documentaries include Griffin Dunne’s Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold; Tom Zimny’s The Promise and the Grammy award winning Wings for Wheels: The Making of Born To Run; Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s The Trials of Darryl Hunt; Peter Gilbert’s With All Deliberate Speed; Blue Note: A Story of Modern Jazz (GRAMMY nomination); Side by Side, AIDS and Zimbabwe; and Neglect Not the Children (Emmy Nominee).
He has made music videos for OK Go, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, David Byrne and Mobe.
