Smoke sauna sisterhood told by its director

Estonian Anna Hints makes a captivating documentary where she collects the powerful secrets of women inside a smoke sauna. A film shot over 7 years of which she shares the behind-the-scenes details.

How and when was the idea for a documentary born?

Anna Hints: I think it dates back to when I was 11 without obviously being aware of it then. To that day when my grandmother took me for the first time to the smoke sauna – this sacred place purifying the body and the soul – where she had her habits and shared with me the rituals. My grandfather had just died. We were going to bury him the next day and we went to this sauna with my grandmother, my aunt and my cousin. There, my grandmother confided to us for the first time that my grandfather had cheated on her. I wouldn't understand it until later, but it was my introduction to the notion of sisterhood. After long minutes spent together in this sauna, my grandmother came out in peace with my grandfather. And I understood that there was a space where all confidences could be said and heard, without judgment. I always kept this in the back of my mind and then one day, in 2015, it all came flooding back, when I went on a silent retreat with my mother to a Buddhist monastery to try to soothe the complicated relationship that we had. These 26 days were an opportunity for me to introspect on my life and my ability to hear what I could feel within myself, to listen to myself. It took me back to when I was 11, with the desire to listen and hear the voices of women who, from generation to generation, have kept silent about the tragedies, the violence that they may have experienced. And immediately, I wanted to make a film about it.

Which may seem contradictory because we imagine that a camera can slow down this impulse to confide, right?

You are right but what you say should apply to any film. Think about the process in advance and not just the end result. Before I launch into Smoke sauna sisterhood and to bring women together in this sauna, I had to set clear rules to respect each person's privacy so that they could confide in front of my camera, without me at any time giving them the feeling of stealing something from them. The first of these rules would be that all bodies would be admitted and naked – including mine – and that my gaze on these bodies would be the opposite of the sexualization that generally goes with the exposure of the female body in our societies. And for this, with my cinematographer Ants Tammik, we went to a sauna before filming to do image tests on my own naked body. To calibrate what we were going to show on the screen, to create a language that allows these bodies to be only bodies and not instruments of fantasy. And we projected these images to all the women who agreed to participate in this project. So that they decide to do it in all conscience, certain that there would be no unpleasant surprises

How did you choose these women?

Here again I set a rule for myself. That of not trying to convince anyone. When I presented my project to them, if I felt the slightest hesitation, I stopped there. When at the heart of the shoot, some who had said yes to me wanted to stop, I never opposed it. Filming lasted 7 years. Estonia is a small country of just over a million inhabitants. So the rumor of this shooting began to spread. And over the years, many women have contacted me to participate. In the end, around forty took part.

Did each person’s confidences come spontaneously once the camera started rolling?

Each session lasted approximately four hours. I didn't provoke anything, didn't ask any questions to start a subject. But each time a woman began to speak and drew confidences from the others. Because the atmosphere was conducive to this, because heat has an effect on the body and the brain and because everyone had also accepted the project for that, to confide things that they had never formulated to anyone, including accounts of rape. They were ready to do it, to free themselves from it in a certain way. And to assure them that I would not betray them, I initially refused to make them sign the apparently obligatory paper where, since they had agreed to be part of the project, I could use their image as I wished. I didn't want such constraint – it went against my approach of total transparency and never forcing anyone – and I can never thank my producer enough for following me in this approach. It was only after they discovered the finished film that they were given this paper to sign. And they all did!

You told us that filming lasted 7 years. When did you know you were done?

It was very intuitive. I felt the need to go into an editing room to figure out how to translate the intimacy and power of what we had experienced into film and make the viewer feel like a participant and not just an observer. It took me almost two more years. But here again everything was intuitive, never cerebral to find, for example, the right balance, the right rhythm between the moments of confidence and those where we come out of the sauna to breathe, in every sense of the word. To hear these testimonies and give them all their power, it was not necessary to string them together but to let the rhythm of the seasons live on the screen, for example. I knew from the start that I had to be patient. But this patience paid off!

Smoke sauna sisterhood. By Anna Hints. Duration: 1h29. Released on 20 March 2024