Sundance Film Festival 2023: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (World Cinema Documentary Competition) Review

Presented at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, Anna Hints’ breakthrough feature debut brilliantly explores the female experience of South Estonian women through conversations in a sauna.

History and trauma, past and present, bodies as landscapes, and transformation of water to heal, are some of the themes in Anna Hints singular film, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. Winner of the Directing Achievement in the World Documentary Competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, this foray into the personal and experiential lives of a close group of adult women in South Estonia, who spend majority of the film sharing their experiences as women dealing with the female experience in South Estonia, all in a sauna, where their bodies intimately dive into their personal stories acting as landscapes battling against oppression and gender disparity.

From the beginning, Hints lays the camera in obtuse angles, mainly capturing specific body parts in relation to these women’s stories. Stories ranging from Estonia’s estrangement towards women as merely objects to the intense horrors treated on these women, Hints’s camera stays still and allows the naked bodies heighten the intimacies of their experiences. The black background illuminated by the tan and whiteness of their bodies causes a chiaroscuro style that is exceptionally displayed and captivating. With these images and stories combined, Hints allows the freedom and space that their sauna ritual provides. In South Estonia, the sauna is considered a tradition a part of the UNESCO list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Shown in the fever and sweaty textures, the sauna acts as a release and cleansing of bodies for these women, both physically and emotionally.

With this cohort of women sharing and cleansing, rituals and folk songs are performed as part of the Estonian tradition to release these pains and weaknesses. Hints brings us to a country where its backwards culture towards women are both outdated and timely. Many subjects include menstruation, virginity, son over daughter, sexual assault, and many more. Through many sessions in this sauna, the women periodically go to a nearby lake to take a dip and refresh their bodies after expelling the evils it released. This activity could be one of the only activities where vulnerability and kinship is shared among women in Estonia.

Hints’ subject material not only uses the sacred location as a meeting point for these women, but symbolically, the sauna itself captures arresting images from its black out background with women silhouettes. Water, also metaphorically plays into the film’s theme of transformation through vaporization. As water reaches the state from liquid to gas, these women’s stories transform their pain to camaraderie. With Hint’s delicate patient and minimal camera movement, the therapeutic release of the women’s hardships is then used for a reflective healing.