There is such raw emotional intimacy in this dazzling documentary from Estonia, filmed in a cabin in the woods where a group of women meet regularly to take a sauna. Estonia’s centuries-old tradition of smoke saunas is Unesco-listed, we learn in the final credits (along with French baguette-making and beekeeping in Slovenia, according to the agency’s website). In the past, babies were born in smoke saunas, the sick were brought to them; they were even used to cure ham. For the women in the film, in the hours sweating naked in the hut – away from families, phones, the relentless exhausting to-do list of being a woman – something happens. They talk: sharing stories, saying the unsayable, nothing off limits. It sounds cheesy but in a deep way the experience is cleansing, sweating the pain away.
There is an otherworldly intensity to director Anna Hints’ photography, illuminating faces and flesh like candlelight, all warmth and heat. The women’s conversations cover everything, from body image hang-ups to complicated relationships with their mothers. There’s a funny bit about dick pics; one woman wonders what would happen if she started sending “pussy pics” to men. Every now and then they dash outside for a freezing dip in the lake (in winter taking an axe to the frozen-over water to dig a bathing hole). The chanting and birch-branch cleaning – presumably ancient smoke sauna rituals – add to the sacred-space mystical feel. (It also made me think of Kate Bush – she’d love this vibe, I’m sure.)
This is a film that weaves a spell, the camera resting often not on the woman talking but on the person listening to her, thereby creating the impression of a universal experience of women. One listener in particular is transfixing; eyes shut, she seems to absorb others’ experiences into her body. We watch her face as a woman tells the story of how she was brutally raped as a teenager while hitchhiking; it’s a moment of shocking power that any writer thinking of adding a rape scene to a fiction film should be forced to watch first.
• Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is released on 13 October in UK and Irish cinemas.
