Final Rating: 4/5
In Anna Hints new documentary, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, we are treated to a slice of life film that shows a group of women laying bare their innermost thoughts and feelings while sharing a sauna. As the film progresses we learn little of the outside world. It takes about half the film to learn that the solitary wooden structure is located on a lake in Estonia.
The upwards of over half a dozen women who frequent the sauna are never named and most of their faces are either never shown or only shot in ways that make them unidentifiable. Despite the fact that we get very little information about the setting and its occupants, truth and honesty seep out of the film and fill your body like taking a deep breath of steam as water is poured over hot rocks.
The film opens with a shot of a naked woman breastfeeding a baby. It isn’t done to titillate or incite, but to matter of factly show the unique power a woman has in the act of the creation of life. We are introduced to a non descript log building, in the middle of a snowy forest, bordering on a frozen lake. Wood has been gathered and placed in an oven as steam slowly fills the room. About six to eight women sit on benches in the sauna and we never see the full geography of the room.
The sauna is completely dark, except for a window on the door that gently illuminates the middle of the room. Most of the women sit in the shadows, with only the front portion of their bodies visible. These women are of all ages, shapes and sizes and since they are nameless and mostly faceless they represent the average Estonian woman.
Time passes, but the only way to notice is the change of the seasons when shots of the outside are shown. In the winter after a steam session, the women partake in a polar bear dip in a move that boosts energy and increases circulation. In the summer, a leisurely swim is enjoyed.
While places like salon’s for women or barber shop’s for men are often seen as a safe place to gossip and chat, the sauna is a sacred space to reveal your innermost thoughts and feelings, free of judgment. Here you get stories and anecdotes from the women concerning abortion, bodily autonomy, beauty standards, abuse, queerness, societal expectations, romance, sex, health scares and more.
One woman talks about discovering she has breast cancer and how she went from nonstop crying to realizing that she isn’t dead yet, so she should start actually living. Another woman who early in the film recounts how her mother never thought she was pretty is raped as an adult and when she tells her mother about it, she is dismissive of her daughters claims as if she wasn’t attractive enough to be assaulted. This woman tells her story laying on her back, her head in another woman’s lap with her arm covering her eyes barely able to contain the trauma she is burdened with.
When abortion comes up, several of the women admit they had the procedure done at various stages in their lives, with others admitting their mothers revealed they also had abortions at some point in their lives. Despite being in a setting where they wouldn’t be judged, some women in the sauna still feel shame in having to give up the life growing inside them as they feel pressure for having done the supposed “wrong” thing.
Anna Hints takes great care in photographing these nude bodies in ways that never feel voyeuristic. Out of privacy of the participants, when we are even shown faces, it is often in extreme close ups, nullifying any identifiable markers. We listen as they share intimate details as we are shown close ups of hands, feet, knees, breasts, mouths and other body parts.
These women scrub each other clean and use birch branch bundles to make viht’s where they hit the backs of a person to help aid in the therapeutic nature of the sauna. At the end of the film, we get a title card that reads “The smoke sauna tradition of Vana-Võromaa in south-east Estonia is a part of the UNESCO list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity”. The communal aspect of using nature to heal oneself celebrating both earth and body is something worth documenting.
The film would likely have been better served to include a bit more structure and information about the aspects of the smoke sauna, but more details provided likely meant revealing more personal identifiers about the women who agreed to be filmed in such vulnerable states. It is beautiful to look at and you can feel the radiating positive energy these women have for each other. The film is Estonia’s submission for the Best International Film award at the 2024 Oscars and is in contention to be shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature as well.
Read our capsule review of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood by Paulo Bautista from DOCNYC.
Thank you to Route504 for the screener.
