The Testament of Ann Lee Screening with Amanda Seyfried at the Crandell

Amanda Seyfried comes home for this one. The Academy Award-nominated actor—who keeps a primary residence in the Catskills when she’s not on set—joins the Shaker Museum and the Crandell Theatre on December 23 for an (already sold out!) exclusive advance screening of The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s sweeping musical portrait of the visionary Shaker founder. For a region that holds some of the most significant Shaker sites in the country, the film lands on familiar ground, and the post-screening Q&A with Seyfried, Crandell’s Mirissa Neff, and the Shaker Museum’s Sharon Duane Koomler promises a rare confluence of cinema, history, and place.

Mona Fastvold has a knack for excavating the emotional weather systems of the past—quietly volatile territories where visionary ambition, spiritual hunger, and the blunt demands of daily life jostle for space. With The Testament of Ann Lee, the award-winning writer-director turns her lens on one of the most singular figures in American religious history: Ann Lee, the English-born mystic who founded the Shaker movement and preached a radical gospel of gender equality, communal labor, and ecstatic worship. Amanda Seyfried delivers a commanding, luminous performance as Mother Ann, a woman propelled by revelation and battered by the difficulty of building a new society inside the old one.

Fastvold has spoken openly about why Seyfried was the only choice for the role. “Amanda has a lot of power. She’s really strong. She is a wonderful mother. She is a little mad, and so I knew that she could access those things,” Fastvold says. “She could access the kindness, the gentleness, the tenderness, and she could also access this power and this madness.” That combination—tenderness braided with ferocity—animates the film’s portrait of a leader both revered and reviled.

Fastvold resists the museum-diorama approach to history. Instead, she presents the Shakers as a kinetic community in motion: devotional, industrious, egalitarian, and musically alive. More than a dozen traditional Shaker hymns become staging grounds for performance sequences choreographed by another Hudson Valley local, Red Hook-based Celia Rowlson-Hall (Vox Lux), translating spiritual rapture into physical movement. Daniel Blumberg’s original songs and score give the film a sonic rigging that moves from austere to incandescent.

For Hudson Valley audiences, Ann Lee’s story is not remote history. The region carries Shaker heritage in its bones. The Shaker Museum, which is building a new home in Chatham scheduled to open in 2028, stewards one of the world’s most significant Shaker collections—furniture, manuscripts, textiles, tools, architectural elements—and preserves the movement’s long arc from Ann Lee’s arrival in 1774 through its expansive 19th-century growth. Its Mount Lebanon site in nearby New Lebanon was once the Shakers’ spiritual and administrative heart, a place where their ideals of communal living and gender parity played out in real time.

Across the Massachusetts border in Pittsfield, Hancock Shaker Village adds a fully immersive counterpart: 20 original buildings, thousands of objects, and the iconic Round Stone Barn, still one of the most striking pieces of religious architecture in North America. (Scenes from The Testament of Ann Lee were filmed there, though principal filming was in Hungary.) Together these institutions anchor the region’s understanding of a movement often reduced to its aesthetic minimalism, but rooted in a complex, fervent, and deeply communal experiment in how to live.

This one-night-only advance screening at the Crandell Theatre brings that history into vivid present tense. After the film, Seyfried joins Crandell’s Mirissa Neff and Shaker Museum’s Sharon Duane Koomler for an in-person Q&A that promises a rare conversation between performer, historian, and the keepers of the Shaker legacy.