The Venice Film Festival hosted a world premiere on Monday afternoon for Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, delivering something close to a religious experience.
The audience responded to the film, which stars Amanda Seyfried as founder of the radical religious sect the Shakers, with TK.
The cult-like group, which formed as an offshoot of Quakerism in Manchester, England in 1747, got its name from worship practices that included trembling, dancing and speaking in tongues. Lee espoused gender and social equality while believing herself to be the female incarnation of Christ, and its members practiced celibacy. The Shakers ended up fleeing to America to escape persecution, ultimately settling near Albany, New York to build their utopia.
The Testament of Ann Lee, which Fastvold directed from a script she co-wrote with her The Brutalist partner Brady Corbet, also stars Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Matthew Beard, Scott Handy, Jamie Bogyo, Viola Prettejohn and David Cale with music by Oscar winner Daniel Blumberg, also from Corbet’s monumental work The Brutalist. Described as “speculative retelling,” the film features than a dozen original Shaker hymns transformed into ecstatic “movements” with choreography from Celia Rowlson-Hall, who worked with Corbet on Vox Lux.
In her festival director’s statement, Fastvold confirmed that while she was raised in a secular household, Lee’s prophecies, “however implausible,” moved her deeply. “Not because I share her faith, but because I recognize 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 endeavor: the urgent need to shape the world anew.”
She said her film is offered as a tribute to Lee’s dream “and the silence that now surrounds it.” The Testament of Ann Lee has its world premiere on Monday afternoon inside Sala Grande. The Venice Film Festival runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.