One of the favorites to make the Oscar documentary feature shortlist this year takes viewers to a remote area of Estonia, within the healing space of the smoke sauna. It is an ancient tradition in that part of the world, a way of “connecting family and friends to cleanse body and soul inside a place of peace and contemplation.”
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, directed by Anna Hints and produced by Marianne Ostrat, won Best Documentary at the European Film Awards last weekend, and on Tuesday earned a PGA Award nomination for Outstanding Producer of a Documentary Motion Picture. Hints shot the film across different seasons, in winter and summer, with a group of women taking part in the smoke sauna ritual: hours in the hot space, naked in the semi-darkness, releasing physical and emotional toxins.
Hints traces her roots to the Southeast Estonian culture of Võromaa and Setomaa and first experienced the transformative power of the smoke sauna as a child, with her grandmother.
“It was this kind of vibration, a totality, like cathartic experience to me,” she recalls, discovering it as a space where people could reveal deeply personal stories, shedding feelings of shame pent up within the body. “It was an initiation for me to these kind of stories and that wow, on this Earth there is this a safe space where absolutely all your experiences and all your emotions can be shared, can be heard without judgment — that this is possible, because often in society it seems like it’s not possible, but then there is this space where you can be so naked, so vulnerable.”
“And this nakedness is nothing sexual,” she adds. “So you’re naked from your body but also your soul and you don’t need to be afraid that you can share in a safe space with people listening.”
The stories shared by the women in Smoke Sauna Sisterhood are human, poignant, sometimes harrowing, and often involve revealing – and releasing – painful experiences. A common theme among many of the women who speak in the film is a realization that from a very young age they have learned to feel shame about their bodies and been told their worth depended on whether they were attractive to men.
“What resonated with me very strongly was this absolute [sense] that your whole existence is validated through whether men want you or not,” Ostrat says. She not only produced the film but took part in some of the sauna sessions with the other women. “There is this small little story from me in the film — the one about lying to the relatives about inventing a boyfriend.”
Ostrat continues, “It was a very personal experience, this sisterhood. I was producing this film, [but also] being part of it, so it wasn’t somehow producing from the outside or trying to ‘control it,’ it was more like facilitating this process.”
Hints says the stories she recorded in the film were unplanned – they arose spontaneously from the circumstances — from what the sauna space allows.
“First, physical sweat starts — the physical dirt starts to come up — and then emotional dirt,” Hints explains. “And you have to be there to capture it and you cannot repeat it. It will not be the same when you repeat it. We had to be, with the cinematographer and sound recordist, ready to capture the miracles.”
The director adds, “I created this safety that it’s totally okay if no story comes up, nothing comes up… just this allowance for the life to emerge, for the authenticity to emerge. It was very important we had agreed that the women will see the whole film in the edit and they can speak and they can say yes or no to that. There was huge trust between me and them.”
UNESCO, an agency of the U.N., has designated the smoke sauna part of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” describing a typical sauna arrangement as “a building or room heated by a stove covered with stones and with an elevated platform for sitting or lying. It has no chimney, and the smoke from burning wood circulates in the room.”
It gets very, very hot inside that wooden space.
“It was 80 degrees Celsius on average (176° F) and one smoke sun session lasted like four hours, but there was one that lasted for eight hours — you’re inside, you go out, but you come back,” Hints explains. “And so it required sensitivity from me not just emotionally to hold the space, but also to check physically that everyone is safe, that people are hydrated. We had a rule that whoever needs to go out, goes out to breathe.”
That was equally true for the photographic equipment, which is not designed to function in such an environment. “We had to be sensitive to the camera and to technology. When you started to sense that, okay, weird sound — the camera needs a break — then the camera went out to breathe. We had ice packs around the camera, and then of course the ice melts, so we had to renew.”
It wasn’t easy for the camera and sound team to function in that extreme heat either. “The cinematographer had gloves and had wet dripping cloth all the time on the head and the same for the sound recordist because your head is really getting very hot and this is how to cool. And it was a challenge, but I feel it really worked because you have to heighten your senses for all the sensitivity to emerge and be sensitive both emotionally and also physically.”
A session in the sauna is typically followed by a plunge into water. In wintertime, that involved breaking through ice to reach flowing water underneath.
“That winter,” Ostrat recalls, “we were swimming with Anna in the river in January in minus 18° Celsius” (slightly above 0° F). Hints adds, “When it’s like minus 20, minus 30 (Celsius), then actually when you come out [of the water], your body steams and there is crackling and you feel really alive with every cell.”
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood premiered at Sundance last January, where Hints won Best Director in the World Cinema Documentary category. The film has won prizes around the world, including the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico. Hints says she finds it stunning how the film connects with people everywhere.
“Every day I get some messages from people all over the world and they’re very personal,” Hints says. “There’s one Japanese woman who has watched the film at least six times. And she says that she’s going there because in her family they are not happy to be vulnerable. So she goes now to a smoke sauna and she processes her own things. And then there was this woman who is 65 or 70, and she understood by watching the film that she has been at war with her body throughout her life. And now she decided to end that war, to stop that war and start to embrace herself.”
The response to the film, Hints says, has taught her something. “To not belittle your voice,” she says. “Even if it doesn’t make sense to somebody in the beginning or somebody who says, ‘Who cares about a smoke sauna in such a small country?’ It has been a big realization to really trust that voice.”