Lee

If the Shakers have a lasting cultural legacy, it is their music — most famously “Simple Gifts,” the uplifting spiritual Aaron Copland immortalized in his ballet “Appalachian Spring.” It stands to reason, then, that a film about Ann Lee, the founding “mother” of this 18th century celibate Christian sect, would be a musical. But this was no conventional woman and “The Testament of Ann Lee,” directed by Mona Fastvold and opening in L.A. on Dec. 25, is no ordinary musical.

“Ann Lee was very radical and extreme,” says composer Daniel Blumberg, “and Mona is as well.”

As conceived by Fastvold and Blumberg, the entire tapestry of this film is musicalized — from the emphatic breathing, chest thumping and floor stomping that make up the worshipers’ rituals, to the songs, inspired by Shaker traditionals and performed by star Amanda Seyfried and the cast. Even the sounds of wind, the creaking of ships and a passing cow play a part.

“This cow walks past during the song ‘I Love Mother,’” says Blumberg, 35, visiting L.A. from his native England and speaking from a hotel room over Zoom. Bald with severe features but a soft and guileless disposition, he’s fidgety about the whole Hollywood press dance — this is only his fourth feature film score. But Blumberg is eager to dissect his music-making process and brag about his collaborators. “We were tuning the cows to the song,” he says.

Amanda Seyfried and Lewis Pullman in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(Searchlight Pictures)

In a prologue about Lee’s harsh childhood in Manchester, England, her mother hums a tune to her based on the traditional Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures.” The melody is then completed on celeste in Blumberg’s score, surrounded by a liturgical choir. The entire film is this kind of holistic musical current: score, songs and environment all in conversation with each other, every component a part of the dance.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg, an indie singer-songwriter with a cult following in the U.K. and now an Oscar for last year’s “The Brutalist.” “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

In one stunning montage, we see a newly married Lee subjugated to religiously-tinged sex (a catalyst for her dogmatic rejection of carnal relations), give birth to several babies, mourn their deaths and express her sorrow in a fervent dance for God. Erotic noises and the cries of childbirth weave together with prayerful moaning and a mother’s keening cries, all integrated into Blumberg’s instrumental score — a guided meditation for bells and strings — with Seyfried singing “Beautiful Treasures.”

“It was very important to me to try and create this hypnotic feel to the film,” says Fastvold, speaking on Zoom from her car during the awards-season whirlwind. “You had to understand it on a sensorial level. Because I think a lot of the appeal, especially early on, were these kinds of endless dance/voice/confession sessions that would last for days.”

“If it’s just someone preaching to you,” she adds, “I certainly can’t connect to that.”

The director, 44, grew up in a secular home in Norway, but her film about this radical American sect is strikingly earnest. Fastvold doesn’t judge Lee’s convictions; there isn’t an ounce of cynicism or condescension. After having a prophetic vision in which Lee is told she is the female incarnation of Jesus Christ, Seyfried sings, “I hunger and thirst / After true righteousness / I hunger and thirst” with utter heart-bleeding sincerity. The camera and the music share her faith completely.

“I never felt like I wanted to laugh at them,” says Fastvold. “I wanted to laugh with them and sometimes their naivete is funny and endearing. But I never wanted to ridicule them. Of course, it’s a very scary thing to try and do.”

When Seyfried read the screenplay two years ago, she experienced some of that intimidation.

“It was definitely the most confused I’ve been in a while reading a script,” she says, nursing a hot tea on Zoom, “because I’m seeing these placeholders for where the hymns will be, when the music comes in, when the diegetic sound goes out or if it doesn’t at all. It was all very foreign to me — which is not necessarily a bad thing. It just leaves me with so many questions.”

Fastvold co-wrote “The Testament of Ann Lee” with her partner, Brady Corbet, who directed “The Brutalist.” They were developing it while working on his breakthrough epic. Blumberg, who has made a number of solo albums and been part of several bands including Cajun Dance Party and Yuck, became friends with Corbet a decade ago. The trio became inseparable.

Fastvold was listening to Blumberg’s records when she decided to direct “The World to Come” in 2020, a warm historical romance about two women in a chilly frontier America. She remembers being captivated by the “beautiful dissonance” in his music. “There’s this mournful, slightly atonal quality to his compositions,” she says.

Fastvold hired Blumberg to score her film — his first — and invited him to the set in Romania to experience the time-traveling feeling of the woods and the sound of passing sheep. She even gave him a small on-screen part, selling a blue dress to Katherine Waterston’s character. It was emblematic of her and Corbet’s then-burgeoning philosophy: of making lavish films on a shoestring, using stunning foreign environments to portray a bygone America and roping crew members and family into the collaboration.

For her ambitious follow-up musical about the Shakers, Fastvold knew she needed Blumberg at the ground level, along with choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, a collaboration that required proximity. “We kind of move in together for a while and just start figuring it out,” Fastvold says.

“The whole project was very dangerous,” says Blumberg. “It’s always on the edge. And for me that’s a good place to be when you’re making art.”

(Ian Spanier / For The Times)

They discussed how to cast a spell on the audience and how, with cinema, “you’ve got these tools to use,” says Blumberg, “with image, sound, the writing of it all and just to push those as far as possible. Obviously with the edit you can move in time very quickly, and then with sound you can bring people into the room that the characters are in, but also bring them into the heavens. It was trying to use the materials that we had to make an experience — with the story, but inside the story as well. An immersive experience.”

Fastvold and Blumberg immersed themselves in the thousands of songs the Shakers left behind, including hymns and what the group called “gift songs” and “dance songs.”

“What is our dialogue with this tradition and what is it that we’re bringing to this conversation?” Fastvold remembers them asking each other. “Because really that, to me, is what folk music is. It’s passed on, it’s transformed — it turns into something else and then passed on again.”

They found several Shaker songs that fit the needs of given scenes and moments; whenever they couldn’t, Blumberg wrote an original. The Jewish composer recalled the niguns — wordless, improvised prayers — that he grew up hearing in synagogue, and he drew on that sense memory. Many Shaker songs are mantra-like prayers addressed to God, simple rising and falling melodies based on a short repeated phrase. Blumberg got creative with the harmonies, creating demos that he sang himself.

“It was very nerve-racking,” he says, “because score is a moment where you can fix things — you do it after the edit — but this was going to define the pace of the film. There’s quite high stakes of it working.”

Seyfried was nervous too. Even though she’s a trained singer, with film credits including “Mamma Mia!” and “Les Misérables,” this peculiar religious epic required an enormous leap of faith.

“I knew Mona was going to shoot it beautifully,” Seyfried says, “and I knew that Daniel was going to be there every step of the way. And I knew that I was in good hands — but I didn’t know at that point that I could trust myself as a singer, as a musician. It was completely new territory for me. Terrifying.”

The songs were prerecorded for playback on set. The first thing Seyfried recorded in studio was an a cappella song for a scene late in the film — the lyric is “How can I but love my dear faithful children?” She says she felt miserable.

“I was just like: I sound terrible,” Seyfried says sincerely. “This song is not fun to sing. It’s beautiful, but I don’t sound beautiful. I don’t like the way I sound. And we kept doing it and my voice was dry.”

Blumberg patiently worked at finding the most comfortable key for her voice. “I had no idea how lucky I was,” she says.

Amanda Seyfried in the movie “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

(TIFF)

In the process of working with Blumberg, Seyfried says she came to a deeper appreciation of the character as well as her own singing voice. “I was so critical of it,” she remembers, but the role gave her a different kind of freedom. “I was playing somebody who didn’t necessarily have to be a beautifully trained singer,” she says. “She sang because she wanted to feel alive, and she wanted to feel free, and she wanted to feel connected to her faith — and that already just liberates the performer.”

After extensive rehearsals that continued throughout production, Fastvold shot the film in Budapest. Blumberg was always on set, accompanying the actors with a small keyboard. (Thomasin McKenzie and Lewis Pullman are among the cast members who also sing in the film.) Sometimes the actors had a simple click track in an earpiece, other times a “stomp track” from the foot choreography. They would sing live in addition to lip-syncing to playback and Fastvold amassed a huge variety of live tracks — vocals, breaths and other bodily sounds — for her final mix.

“I wanted all of that life and that natural feel to it,” she says, “to not have it feel polished at all, to just be really raw. Because they weren’t singing to entertain. It’s never performative. It’s always from this place of prayer or pain.”

With her principal cast surrounded by Hungarian extras, Fastvold roped everyone, from the dialect coach to the first assistant director’s son to Blumberg’s sister, into the dance.

“If you came to visit, you were in the movie,” she says. “The cast is the crew and the crew is the cast. It’s how I like to do it.” Once again, Daniel Blumberg appears on-screen, in scenes of Shaker worship; he also sings an original duet, “Clothed by the Sun,” with Seyfried under the end credits.

But at this point his work was only half done. Armed with a cut of the film, pillared by the songs he wrote and arranged, Blumberg crafted a score that subtly teed up song melodies and established a sense of spiritual trance. He gravitated toward the sound of bells; he and Fastvold found a handbell from Ann’s era that they used in early demos and he ended up renting some 50 church bells, in different keys, all laid out on the floor of his London flat.

He extended the bell idea with the jangly celeste, also known as a bell piano, and he augmented those bells with a small string ensemble, a choir and, at one point, even an electric guitar.

It was Blumberg’s idea to have two veteran improvising singers, Phil Menton and Maggie Nichols (who also appears in the film), to each record a track where they improvised along to the entire film. Working with mixer Steve Single, Fastvold and Blumberg would occasionally bring up one of these stems and layer it into the rest of the soundtrack for an added color.

“We’d say, ‘Let’s hear what Maggie was doing at this point,’” Blumberg says, “and then we’d bring up her stem and be like, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if she follows that character there?’ Or, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if she’s humming outside the window?’ Or if it’s almost like the heavens speaking down on Ann?”

The final result is utterly unique to Blumberg and Fastvold, a period character study by way of trance and an experiential approximation of religious fervor. By exploring a distant and somewhat alien community through the device of music, they somehow tapped into something universal.

One of Blumberg’s favorite moments in the film is a scene where a group of sailors, transporting Lee and her disciples to the new world, shout at the Shakers to stop singing. “They really sound like this out-of-tune rabble, and you hear what maybe other people might have heard,” he says. “And then a few minutes later they’re praying on the ship and I’ve used all these reverbs and there’s all these choirs singing in the background — it’s almost like what they felt from within.”

Like the Shakers and their songs and prized furniture, “Ann Lee” was made with craft and care by a small and familial utopian community of its own.

“There were no notes from film people,” says Blumberg. “It was our bubble. So the only fear was just them trying to release it and everyone going, ‘No, that’s just mad.’ But what I was trying to do from the start was: If I got to something that seemed good, how can I push that further? Like, really trying to push everything to the extreme.”

Dec. 19 (Asia Today) — President Lee Jae-myung on Friday questioned South Korea’s restrictions on access to North Korean state media such as Rodong Sinmun and the Korean Central News Agency, saying the policy treats citizens as if they could be swayed by propaganda.

“Isn’t the reason for blocking access to Rodong Sinmun because they fear the public might fall for propaganda and become communists?” Lee said during a joint briefing by the Foreign Ministry and the Unification Ministry at the Government Complex Seoul.

Lee criticized the approach as treating the public “not as autonomous beings” but as people susceptible to “propaganda and agitation,” and he ordered that access to North Korean media be opened.

Lee asked a Unification Ministry official whether opening access could trigger political backlash, including accusations that the government is trying to turn South Korea into a communist state.

The official cited Rodong Sinmun as an example, saying ordinary citizens and researchers currently cannot access it in real time under existing rules, even though South Korean media and scholars frequently cite it.

“There is a gap between the system and reality,” the official said.

Lee pressed the point, asking why citizens should be prevented from seeing it and whether officials were afraid they might be influenced by propaganda.

Lee said greater access could help the public better understand North Korea and its realities. He argued the restriction, as currently applied, assumes citizens are vulnerable to manipulation.

When a Unification Ministry official said the ministry would pursue opening access to North Korean information, including Rodong Sinmun, as a national policy task, Lee said it did not need to be treated as a solemn initiative.

“Why pursue this as a national policy task? Just open it up,” he said.

– Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Dec. 19 (Asia Today) — President Lee Jae-myung said Friday that while North Korea’s “hostile two-state” line may reflect current realities, South Korea must “return to our proper place” and work to restore channels for contact, dialogue and cooperation.

Speaking at a joint work report by the Foreign Ministry and the Unification Ministry at the Government Complex Seoul, Lee pointed to what he described as an unprecedented buildup along the inter-Korean boundary.

“For the first time since the 1950s war, North Korea has erected triple fences along the entire demarcation line, severed bridges, cut off roads and built retaining walls,” Lee said. He added that North Korea may have acted out of concern that the South could invade, but said it was regrettable and appeared tied to “strategic desires.”

Lee said the moves could be part of Pyongyang’s strategy, but argued South Korea must respond with patience and sustained effort to improve what he described as a situation in which the North “fundamentally refuses contact itself.”

“As I’ve said before, we must find even the smallest opening,” Lee said. “We need to communicate, engage in dialogue, cooperate and pursue a path of coexistence and mutual prosperity between the North and South.”

He said there is currently “not even a needle’s eye of an opening,” repeating that the situation is “truly not easy.”

Lee also appeared to criticize the previous administration’s approach to North Korea, saying “one could call it a kind of karma.” He added that if a strategy contributed to the current impasse, “then we must change it now.”

Lee said the government should make proactive efforts to ease tensions and create conditions for trust to emerge, adding that the Unification Ministry should now take a leading role.

“It is certainly not an easy task, but it is equally clear that it is not something we should give up on,” he said.

– Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

L.os Angeles City Councilmember John Lee is facing a steep fine for his notorious 2017 trip to Las Vegas, with the city’s Ethics Commission saying he must pay $138,424 in a case involving pricey meals and expensive nightclub “bottle service.”

On Wednesday, the commission decided 4 to 0 that Lee, who represents the northwest San Fernando Valley, committed two counts of violating the city’s gift law and three counts of violating a law requiring that such gifts be disclosed to the public.

By a 3-1 vote, the panel found that Lee violated five additional counts of misusing his city position or helping his boss at the time — Councilmember Mitchell Englander — misuse his position. After that, the commission voted unanimously to levy the maximum financial penalty, as recommended by city ethics investigators.

The commission went much further than an administrative law judge, who, after a multiday hearing, concluded that Lee violated five of 10 counts and recommended a fine of nearly $44,000.

Commission President Manjusha Kulkarni argued for the maximum fine, saying it would discourage others from violating ethics laws. She said Lee directly benefited from his decision not to report the gifts — which came from three men who sought business with City Hall — on his economic disclosure forms.

Lee, by failing to report those gifts, gained an unfair advantage during his 2019 and 2020 election campaigns, both of which he won by small margins, Kulkarni said.

“There was a concealment effort made there in order to win those two elections,” she said.

Commissioner Aryeh Cohen voted against the five additional ethics counts, saying he wasn’t convinced that the gift information would have made a difference. Last year, after city investigators accused Lee of violating gift laws, he won reelection handily.

“Voters knew, and he won by a larger margin” than in 2019 or 2020, Cohen said. “So I don’t think that that was a misuse of a position or gaining benefit from it.”

Brian Hildreth, an attorney representing Lee, had argued for a maximum fine of $10,000. Appearing before the commission, he said city investigators incorrectly calculated the value of the gifts and failed to take into account how much Lee had actually consumed at the food and drink venues.

Lee, in a statement, vowed to keep fighting the charges, calling the case “wasteful and political.” An appeal would need to be filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“Today is but one step in the process of fighting these baseless charges,” he said. “I look forward to finally having an opportunity to have this matter adjudicated in a fair and impartial setting.”

The Lee case revolves around gifts — mostly meals and alcohol but also hotel stays, transportation and $1,000 in gambling chips — provided by the three businessmen: Andy Wang, who peddled Italian cabinets, “smart home” technology and facial recognition software; architect and developer Chris Pak; and lobbyist Michael Bai.

Lee, while working as Englander’s chief of staff, flew with his boss and several others — including Wang and Bai — to Las Vegas in 2017. Englander resigned from office the following year, after being contacted by FBI agents about the trip.

In 2020, federal prosecutors accused Englander of accepting $15,000 in cash from Wang, lying to FBI agents and obstructing their investigation. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single count of providing false information to the FBI and was sentenced to 14 months in prison.

In 2023, Englander agreed to pay $79,830 to settle an Ethics Commission case focused on his own gift law violations. That same year, the commission filed a case against Lee, saying he violated the gift law not just in Vegas but also at restaurants in downtown L.A. and Koreatown.

Lee repeatedly denied the allegations and argued that the statute of limitations had run out. The commission responded by scheduling a multiday hearing, held in June before Administrative Law Judge Ji-Lan Zang.

During those proceedings, Lee said he made a good faith effort to pay his own way and, in some cases, declined to eat during meals. For example, he testified that he did not remember eating during the meetings at Yxta Cocina Mexicana and Water Grill, both in downtown L.A.

Zang, in her written report to the commission, called those denials “not credible,” saying it “strains credulity” to believe that he would join the group at those restaurants without eating any food.

During the Las Vegas trip, Lee stayed at the Aria hotel, went to Blossom restaurant and spent an evening with the group at Hakkasan Nightclub.

At Blossom, Wang ordered a dinner worth nearly $2,500 that included shark fin soup, Peking duck and Kobe beef. Lee testified over the summer that he arrived at the restaurant in time for a dessert of bird’s nest soup, tasting it and deciding he did not like it.

At Hakkasan Nightclub later that night, Wang purchased three rounds of bottle service for the group for around $8,000 apiece, while Pak purchased a fourth round for $8,418.75.

Lee said he gave Wang $300 in cash as reimbursement for his drinks, withdrawing money from an ATM. Hildreth, his attorney, told the commission that drinks were served to a large number of nightclubgoers.

“The testimony and the evidence suggests that dozens and dozens of people were joining Councilmember Lee and others,” he said.

Kulkarni, before the vote, said she was especially troubled that Lee, after being contacted by FBI agents in 2017, sent Wang a backdated check for $442 to reimburse him for some of the Vegas trip. That act on its own, she said, constituted “a very serious offense.”

“That is not a mistake that one does. That is an affirmative act,” she said.

Hildreth said his client wrote a reimbursement check right away but that it was lost, necessitating a second, backdated check. He also noted that Lee cooperated with federal law enforcement and city ethics investigators.

“He sat for two interviews with the FBI,” Hildreth said. “That’s not something that deserves a punitive penalty.”

Los Angeles City Councilman John Lee repeatedly violated the city’s gift laws in 2016 and 2017, accepting freebies during a lavish trip to Las Vegas and at multiple restaurants in L.A., a judge said in a filing released Friday.

In a 59-page proposed decision, Administrative Law Judge Ji-Lan Zang concluded that Lee committed two counts of violating a law governing the size of gifts a city official can receive and three counts of violating a law requiring that such gifts be publicly disclosed.

Zang recommended a $43,730 penalty for Lee, who represents the northwest San Fernando Valley and was chief of staff to then-City Councilmember Mitchell Englander at the time of the alleged violations. However, the judge did not agree with allegations by city ethics investigators that Lee misused his position or helped Englander misuse his position.

In 2020, federal prosecutors accused Englander of accepting $15,000 in cash from businessman Andy Wang, lying to FBI agents and obstructing their investigation into the 2017 Vegas trip. Englander ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of providing false information to the FBI and was sentenced to 14 months in prison.

The five-member Los Angeles City Ethics Commission is scheduled to make a determination on Wednesday, deciding both the number of violations Lee committed and any financial penalties to impose on him.

The commission has the power to accept or reject Zang’s recommendations. Ethics investigators have recommended that the commission take a more punitive approach by fining Lee about $138,000 and holding him responsible for all 10 counts.

The Lee case revolves around gifts — mostly food and alcohol but also hotel stays, transportation and $1,000 in gambling chips — provided by three men who have sought to do business with City Hall: Wang, who peddled Italian cabinets, “smart home” technology and facial recognition software; architect and developer Chris Pak; and lobbyist Michael Bai.

The judge issued her report six months after a multi-day hearing on the allegations against Lee, who replaced Englander on the council in 2019.

During those proceedings, Lee denied that he improperly accepted gifts, saying he made a good faith effort to pay his own way and, in some cases, declined to eat during meals. For example, he testified that he did not remember eating during his meetings at Yxta and Water Grill, both of which are in downtown L.A.

Zang, in her report, called those denials “not credible,” describing his testimony as “evasive and self contradictory.” She said Lee’s testimony also was in conflict with information he gave the FBI during its investigation into Englander, as well as testimony from other witnesses.

“It strains credulity to believe that [Lee] would join Englander, Bai, and Wang for lunch at Yxta and dinner at Water Grill without eating any food during the meals,” she wrote.

Ethics investigators have accused Lee of receiving an assortment of gifts during the 2017 Vegas trip with Englander and several others. Lee and a group of friends stayed at the Aria hotel and spent an evening at the Hakkasan Nightclub, according to the city’s allegations.

At the hotel restaurant, Blossom, Wang ordered a dinner worth nearly $2,500 for the group, which included Englander, Lee and several others, sending out servings of shark fin soup, Peking duck and Kobe beef, according to the judge’s summary of events.

Lee testified that he arrived at the restaurant in time for a dessert of bird’s nest soup, tasting it and deciding he did not like it, the judge said in her filing.

At Hakkasan later that night, Wang purchased three rounds of bottle service for the group for around $8,000 apiece, while Pak paid for a fourth round at a cost of $8,418.75.

“Each round of bottle service was served with fanfare, as female VIP hostesses brought bottles of alcohol to the table with flashing lights,” the judge wrote.

That night, at least 20 other club patrons went to Wang’s booth and drank alcohol at the table, according to the judge’s filing.

Lee was never charged by federal prosecutors and has said he was unaware of wrongdoing by Englander. In a filing submitted last week, his attorneys said that investigators incorrectly calculated the value of the gifts, including the bottles of alcohol, whose contents were distributed among many people.

Lee gave Wang $300 in cash as reimbursement for his drinks, withdrawing money from an ATM in Las Vegas to cover those expenses, his lawyers said.

In their reply to the city, Lee’s attorneys contend that the statute of limitations has expired on the city ethics counts. They have also pushed back on the recommendation from city ethics investigators that Lee pay a $138,000 penalty.

“Such inflated numbers are not grounded in reason, have no basis in the record, no support in the governing law, and no place in a fair and impartial enforcement system,” they wrote in their filing.

Englander previously agreed to pay $79,830 to settle a similar Ethics Commission case over the gifts he received.

Ethics investigators have accused Lee of committing 10 counts of violating city laws — two counts of accepting gifts in excess of the legal limit, three counts of failing to report those gifts on his public disclosure forms, four counts of misusing his position and one count of aiding and abetting Englander’s misuse of his position.

In 2016, the legal limit on gifts to city officials was $460 per donor. The following year, it was $470.

In Englander’s 2020 federal indictment, Lee was mentioned not by name, but instead referred to as “City Staffer B.” Despite his legal troubles, he won reelection in 2024.