To Build Her 'The Testament of Ann Lee,' Filmmaker Mona Fastvold Had to Imagine Her Own Kind of Utopia

"Mona Fastvold has always been drawn to stories about women who lived their lives in the future. Women who dared to imagine how bitter pasts might give way to brighter tomorrows, and did what they could to bring those changes into being. Women - immigrants and settlers - who embodied the utopian potential of a country that has always struggled to live by its own principles, and refused to accept that they were ahead of their time."

"Sat across the table from me at a brunch spot near her apartment in Boerum Hill, Fastvold was understandably demure and evasive whenever I tried to frame "The Testament of Ann Lee" as something of a self-portrait; in an age where even the most innocuous of comments are spread across the internet in bad faith, it's more than a little perverse for a critic to press an artist on if and how they might see themselves reflected by the subject of a sweeping religious musical about an 18th Mancunian religious figure whose followers came to regard her as the female embodiment of God on Earth."

IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 will celebrate creators and stars behind the year's best films, curated and selected by IndieWire's editorial team. The event will showcase honorees' work in Los Angeles with new interviews and tributes from peers. Mona Fastvold gravitates toward stories about women who lived their lives in the future and imagined how bitter pasts might yield brighter tomorrows. Fastvold's third feature exults in that sensibility and aligns her with historical figures who sought to remake communal life. Fastvold responded to questions about a self-portrait reading with demure evasiveness, while the film clearly conveys her identification with Ann Lee's desire to devise a more hospitable framework for practicing faith.

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