Director Anna Hints traces her love for the smoke sauna back to when she was a child, and a profound experience she had after the death of her grandfather.
While his body was laid out in his cottage, the 11-year-old Hints went to the sauna with her aunt and grandmother. “It was the first and the only time when my granny confessed that my grandfather had actually lived with another woman, had betrayed on her. She released these emotions, her anger and disappointment and sadness, and [then] kind of made peace with [him],” the director tells BDE of the shared sauna experience which was, for the young girl, epiphinal.
Two more events propelled Hints towards her film Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which was selected for CPH:DOX Next:Wave following its success at Sundance where it picked up the Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary. Sales for the film are handled by Autlook.
Ten years after her first sauna experience she departed Estonia, determined to leave behind what she felt was a country going nowhere and stuck in a Soviet past. She arrived in the US, eventually finding herself in the company of a group indigenous Americans within a “sweat lodge.” And when they began to chant, so did she, in the process rediscovering and channeling a heritage that she had turned her back on.
The prime motivation for the film came in 2015 when she was staying in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand with her mother, “with whom I have had a very turbulent relationship,” she says. The retreat entailed 26 days of silent meditation. “In that silence, I understood the importance of ‘voice,’ and what it means when you have [no] voice to express yourself.” The enforced silence of the monastery was in stark contrast to the smoke sauna which represented ‘voice’ in its purest form. The smoke sauna represented communication. It was, she remembered, a place where women gave birth, with all the attendant voices of help, support, pain and new life that that process entails.
In Hints’ film, we meet a cast of women who cast off their clothing and enter the heat and smoke of the sauna to talk and to listen and to undergo catharsis. The stories that we hear, much of the time told in monologue, are enthralling, hilarious, tragic or desperately sad.
One woman talks about how she overcame her sense of ugliness, only feeling beautiful when she entered her 40’s. Another tells of a cancer diagnosis and how a date cancelled by a feckless male gave her a renewed will to live. We hear the ludicrously funny story of a woman who, when having sex, had to invite and grant permission to the penis before insertion, all at the behest of the penis’ owner. There is a wonderfully moving account of the Damascene moment when a woman realises that she is attracted to other women (even though the woman she fell for rudely rebuffed her advances). Towards the end of the film we listen to a long and horrendous account of a rape ordeal.
All these stories are told in the dark of the sauna among kind and empathetic women, and each scene resembles a smoky Rembrandt painting.
“When you enter the smoke sauna, you greet it,” says Hints. “There is a certain personification. There is this specific smell and it is dark. And you really get this feeling that when you take off your clothes, you [remove] these of concepts about yourself.”
“There is this space where you don’t see. There is no electricity. There might be candles, but sometimes when you actually go there is no light at all,” she continues. “And in that candle light, you don’t look into the eye of the other person, but you feel the other person, you feel the body, you feel the presence, you feel what they’re talking. And there is just this heat. You sweat…and you can have all kinds of feelings in your body or sensations.”
There are the base elements of fire and water, and ice in winter when a hole is cut into the surface of a frozen lake before a bracing plunge and quick return to the heat of the sauna. “You feel again like you’re in the mother’s womb. It really functions like we have this subconscious yearning for that experience when we were in the womb, this place of protection, dark and totally safe.”
Yes, Hints could have followed any one of the protagonists back to their homes, back to the real world of their everyday lives to continue with their stories. “But that would be totally against what I was trying to tell. That is the magic. You go into this smoke sauna and you don’t care…it’s the space [in which] somebody tells and somebody listens.”
Filming in the extreme heat and smoke of course threw up some challenges for the DOP and crew (both males, interestingly). They used more candles for illumination and, at times, allowed for a little more daylight to enter the inner sanctum of the sauna. “They had a cloth and ice bags around the camera, and helpers from outside provided wet cloths for their heads,” says Hints. The sensitive lenses needed particular acclimatization, starting at ground level before moved higher, like a diver trying to avoid the bends.
Hints reflects on the seven-year process of getting her film completed.
“There have been so many ups and downs and literally a lot of sweat, and a lot of magic also,” she says. “I think the whole journey that culminated at Sundance …is basically telling me to trust really deeply your intuition, to trust this gut feeling and the riches that are inside you. Because when I think about my journey towards being a director, I remember when I was a teenager and then I was very broken. It was a very difficult time and I contemplated suicide and whether to live or not.”
So Hints stayed at home and watched films, and the more she watched the more a dream, or a sense of “recognition” developed inside her. “Maybe I could also do it,” she thought. “I felt that there was so much inside me that I want to tell to this world. It seemed like an impossible task [but] now I’m here and it shows that [you] never give up. I would like tell all these teenagers or whoever feels that they have stories inside them or things to express, to keep on living and follow the dream and it can come true.”
