Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Saw this at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival

"Smoke Sauna Sisterhood" is a documentary about the darkness of a smoke sauna, women share their innermost secrets and intimate experiences, washing off the shame trapped in their bodies and regaining their strength through a sense of communion. This documentary is pretty strange and weird, but I really like this film.

Throughout, the visual presentation and sound designs helps to capture the essence of a sauna, tone, and environment of Estonia. The words expressed from the participants are interesting as they helped to provide quite memorizing discussions about womanhood and their bodies. Each direction felt like the film was taking a half documentary and half narrative type style with beautiful soundtrack and writing throughout.

The idea of people going in saunas to have spiritual experiences is quite fascinating.

This won the Directing, Screenwriting and Editing award for the World Dramatic Documentary Competition and I can see why. The writing, directing and style of editing is really good and the award was well-deserved.

Rating: A-

This is a visually stunning film, shot at an Estonian Smoke Sauna and its surroundings, with cinematic footage throughout. The film is completely shot in Direct Cinema style. We are there with the women watching as the scenes take place. There are no interviews, no narration, only meticulously edited sequences that together tell a story that grows as the film advances, from childhood memories to traumas that must be exorcised in the intimate heat of the sauna. Masterfully done. As the personal stories are shared, we see a theme emerge: millennia of oppression of women. Because there's no narration or interviews, the theme emerges naturally and the film does not feel preachy: the individual stories are a part of a larger collective story.

This is a very intimate exploration of the female psyche, but at the same time it's barely a film. Naked women in South Estonia spend time in a sauna sharing their secrets and pains and thus ritualistically cleansing themselves of them. An interesting concept, I would say especially for young people who have not been exposed to these kind of stories or had never had the opportunity to feel understood by peers and might learn something. There is some beautiful scenery and traditional and mystical rituals that are filmed very nicely, too.

However nothing else much happens. If you are in the mood to hear these intimate stories of childhood trauma, love, teen love, abortions, rape, violence, mother daughter relationship, lesbianism, body image issues and so on, this is a great film for you. Yet at the same time it can be considered a loose collection of short female confessions that can be read separately, like a series of blog posts. My wife absolutely loved it. I felt it was not for me, although I appreciated it the format.

The sauna in East Estonia and Finland and those areas is not merely a thing you do for pleasure, but has deep roots in their old culture, even pre-Christian and may have roots in rituals in the Neolithic. The film touches on that through scenes that show what is being done, but without any explanation. Read about it, it's fascinating.

Bottom line: it's a film for women.

Set in South Estonia, the film explores the old tradition of smoke sauna and chooses to do so in the context of women's solidarity: when they perform the sauna ritual together, they have nothing to hide. So they open up and tell their stories, crying out their pain and fears, sometimes they sing and get out to bathe in the lake (even when it's icy! - they cut a hole in the ice), but most often they just let each other get it off their chest and just listen. By this listening they teach us to listen too, with no judgement but with a lot of empathy and compassion and an open heart. The body is washed, the ritual is performed, now it's the turn for the pain to go. And if it comes again, which it definitely will, they know where to go.

Very intimate, empowering and full of revelation.

If they had used the Sauna Radar portal, such problems would not have happened. I'm kidding=) But seriously, "Smoke Sauna Sisterhood" feels like a work of reflective art, weaving stories of relatable pains and joys as women, allowing all involved to heal and cleanse together. As a viewer, it's comforting to see the different layers of healing found universally.

A tidal wave of emotion that builds and builds into a crashing catharsis. While most documentaries thrive on the strength of their story, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is powerful simply because it accords a group of women the space to tell theirs.