or to have that jump of faith and such conviction against all this adversity. It was so effective in drawing you in and imagining what it would have felt like to have been in that time. You can read all the histories, and you can read all the scholarly work around it, but that doesn ' t always create the sense of how it must have felt. This film does that so powerfully.”
IN THE BEGINNING
Fastvold is no stranger to this region. She shot her first film in Sturbridge( The Sleepwalker) and has spent a lot of time in Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York. She feels a kinship to the area. Being from Norway and now living in Brooklyn, she needs time in the woods and time with her friends who live in the area, like Seyfried. Fastvold didn’ t know much beyond Shaker architecture, furniture, and boxes until she started looking for a hymn song from colonial times from the area when she was filming The World to Come. She came upon“ Pretty Mother’ s Home” and was drawn to it. Although she didn’ t end up using the hymn song in The World to Come, she wanted to know more about the person who wrote it. The author was Patsy Williamson, who was enslaved until the Shakers purchased her legal freedom in 1812, and she subsequently became an integral member of Pleasant Hill Shaker community in Kentucky.
Fastvold started reading about the Shakers and realized how little people knew about the founder’ s story.“ I thought that perhaps Ann Lee was the first American feminist who fought for equality of others between gender and race at the time,” says Fastvold.“ She had this dream of a different kind of society where all human beings were equal— adults, children, everyone treated with love and respect.” The Shaker community grew to close to 6,000 believers at its peak in the mid-1800s. Fastvold was hooked on the Shaker’ s history and Mother Ann’ s story and made visits to the Hancock and New Lebanon Shaker villages, as well as doing extensive library research.
One obvious thing was that because there was no birth control during that time, it wasn’ t unusual for women to have
14 children. Ann Lee thought that to create autonomy for women, childbirth had to be removed, establishing a different family and societal structure. Fastvold also wanted to explore this immense trauma that Ann Lee went through that made it necessary for her to reject sexuality altogether to survive. Fastvold wanted the audience to understand what she went through.
Even though the movie is based on a real person, the story is fiction. At some point, Fastvold and Corbet had to decide what story to tell and why they wanted to tell it now.
“ It becomes personal at some point,” says Fastvold.“ What we know about her life is all hearsay. She didn ' t write anything down herself. She was illiterate. It’ s from her followers. It ' s a story told to one person, told to another, told to a third. We know certain things were true. We know the age when she died. We know where she was born. We know roughly how many family members she had.
“ All the stories about her, they are their interpretations. And then here comes my interpretation, as well. We wanted to treat
Outside the Laundry & Machine Shop duriing filming of The Testament of Ann Lee.( Carrie Holland) At top and opposite page, film stills from scenes that were done at Hancock Shaker Village.
Holiday 2025 BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE // 21