When Anna Hints was invited to Sundance with her feature debut “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” she couldn’t know what audiences would make of her documentary set inside of a spa in her native Estonia, but she knew how she was going to end each screening.
“I’m a singer also, so it was natural that I [had] this impulse to sing and this thank you song is my way to give something back to the audience,” Hints said of the simple sing-along that’s put a tender punctuation point on every public premiere of the film from IDFA in Amsterdam to AFI Fest in Los Angeles. “Because I think it’s such a big thing when people take their time to come see our film and it’s also a way to connect with the audience and somehow create this kind of union. We come together, despite our differences, and we sing and people say that through the singing they feel how this cinema is transformed into a collective experience and smoke sauna.”
That communal feeling is likely to continue well after “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” recently selected by Estonia as their official Oscar entry, is released widely into the world and the director may no longer be able to make it to every screening of the film, yet has so effectively remade every theater it plays into an open space for meaningful discussion that strangers walking in are bound to have felt as if they’ve shared something walking out. It’s an infectious quality that Hints has been cultivating for the past seven years, asking something of her subjects that is potentially unimaginable in shedding their clothes and revealing even more intimate details about their lives in front of the camera, yet as word spread locally about what Hints was up to at Smoke Sauna, the director found more and more women volunteering as they unburdened themselves of the private struggles they had in a male-dominated society, finally airing stories of embracing the bodies they were born in, coming into their own as sexual beings and enduring such hardships as cancer and abuse.
Intricately filmed so flesh is gradually exposed at the rate of emotional revelation, the film is the result of remarkable conscientiousness on the part of the filmmaker, who not only nurtures a conversation between 25 women to speak candidly to one another but had to take into account the technical obstacles of filming inside a sauna, gradually moving the camera, covered in ice packs, up every two hours as the temperature rose. Cutting through a fog in so many ways, Hints has created unique access into subjects that are rarely bandied about on screen in such bracing detail and it has made “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” a sensation as it’s played the festival circuit. As it makes its way to U.S. theaters this week, Hints spoke about the evolution of the project from its inception as a silent retreat in Thailand to taking the world by storm after the film scored a Best Director prize at Sundance and how as she was getting others to open up to her, the process required excavating subjects that lived inside her for some time before she could find the right vessel to release them.
This film was shot in your hometown and yet the idea came to you in Thailand. How did these two things come together?
Actually, the impulse for this film comes from the time when I was 11 and my granny introduced me to all the rituals and the sacredness of smoke sauna culture. My grandfather had just died and we were in the countryside and his body was in the house. I went to the smoke sauna one day before the funeral [with] my granny, aunt and niece and it was there where Granny revealed that Grandfather had actually cheated on her, not just once, but several times and she confessed how difficult it was [being from the] Soviet Union after the war for kids. She released all the emotions connected with that – the pain, the anger, and there was also a lot of shame. One smoke sauna session lasts several hours and we were all there witnessing that and once we went out and put clothes on, I felt that Granny had made peace with grandfather, so the next day we could bury him in peace and it was like another layer opened of smoke sauna and I realized that this is a safe space where absolutely all your emotions and all your experiences can be shared and can be heard and when we give voice to them, and when we hear somebody else’s story, there’s huge healing power. So when somebody asks how long I’ve been making the film, statistically, I made it in seven years, but I started [thinking] to make it when I was 11.
Then in 2015, I was at a monastery in Thailand, doing a silent retreat with my mother. It was 26 days of silence and Vipassana meditation and I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t read. And in that silence, I started to notice inside me these voices, and I started to question, “Is it my voice? Am I speaking with my voice? Or who does the voice belong to? Maybe this voice belongs to my mother and my grandmother and my grandfather,” and then I also noticed there were several voices that were silenced and [this and] my experience from smoke sauna came together [for] a vision for the film. Women in smoke sauna are actually very connected because women use it to give birth, wash the dead and heal, so it’s a significant place, and sometimes maybe the only place, where you can be fully naked body and soul and when I had this vision, I really wanted to write it down, but when I went to this lady monk, with whom you could go when there was like something very important, [I told her] “This is so important, I have to write it down. Otherwise, this idea goes away.”But she [said], “No, you came here to do the silent retreat. So no writing.” But she told me that when it is something important, it will stay with you.
I learned a very important lesson from her that I’m now using when contemplating a new idea. If I have the urge to write it down, I don’t – I leave it for a certain period of time, like 26 days to see if it stays with me. And when it stays, then I know that this is strong voice inside me and this is so important as a filmmaker because this voice of yours is carrying you through the challenges of filmmaking. I made [this film] over seven years and you can imagine a lot of challenges starting from filming in a real hot smoke sauna to the intimacy of the women, so you have to have that deep voice and that deep need to make that film.
The film has this remarkable steady progression that feels as if it’s revealing more and more as it goes on. What was it like to find the rhythm of it?
I edited the film two years altogether, and I had all the pieces there and each scene had its own energy, its own impulse, and its own dynamics, and then it was like, I was approaching it as like a music piece. Already while filming, all those moments inside smoke sauna where I felt just like visceral bodily reaction, I knew that I can trust that this is strong, but what really took time was to figure out the visual language, finding this together with the cinematographer [where] I can trust that and then I don’t think about at all, so I could just feel that emotional space and be there with the women. The challenge there was that I have the naked female bodies, and even though the nudity in smoke sauna isn’t sexual — we come together, we sweat together, different bodies, different ages — at the same time, the naked female body is so oversexualized in society, and for me, the challenge was really to get that non sexual view of the naked female body. For that, I was testing on my own body, and working with the cinematographer to find the language, and then when I felt safe, I showed [those camera tests] to the women and then they felt safe. In order to have strong materials visually, you have to put time beforehand to figure your language out.
When I’m inside smoke sauna, I feel like I’m inside a Caravaggio painting and that became a key not only for how to light, but also for the music. There’s like a symphony of sounds and [it becomes like] music of that consists of the dropping of the sweat, the fire, the water, the metal, the crack of the wood, and the impulse was not to impose music on [the scenes], but to create [the rhythm] from these elements and the voices that you hear in the film [musically] are the melodies from that region. There is also my voice in the film, and I know those old songs and for me, singing islike breathing. It’s part of my existence and and it’s something very natural to me. Often where I feel I don’t have words, I start to sing and then the words come, so people that know me know me and singing go together.
Over those seven years, as you’re hearing the conversations between the women, does anything change in your mind about what actually is important to convey?
I had the rule that outside smoke sauna, we don’t talk about what we’re going to talk about in smoke sauna to have the authentic experience [in camera] and one smoke sauna session lasts several hours, so it was always like entering into unknown. I didn’t know what stories would come up. But that was the beauty for me. Let’s experience the real experience and at the beginning of the process, I thought the courage to share the uncomfortable, – our pain, our shame, and things that often we hide – was important, but while making the film, I realized the courage to hear the uncomfortable was important. Are we ready to hear the uncomfortable? Often we are avoiding it, or we want to hear the uncomfortable in a comfortable way, like “Tell me about rape, but tell comfortably about it.” And there is nothing comfortable about it. So [it became about] how to develop the ability to hear the uncomfortable in society, and only then when we have that ability, are we able to share their uncomfortable and smoke sauna offers this kind of space where we can come together to open up our deepest fears and shame and pain. When we have that safe space, then we come out from that smoke sauna lighter and more empowered.
My granny often used to say that when we have traumas, it is like frozen water inside us and we can find ourselves in life where there is only ice around, but then it’s so important not to forget that this frozen water has the power to flow again. We just need warmth and this tradition of smoke sauna offers this space to melt our traumas, to tell and share our story, and to hear other people’s story. So hearing the stories that came up, it was such a blessing and privilege. And this film is made in a very unique culture in on this earth and in a small place, but at the same time, I’m traveling with this film and it is so universal. Right now, I’m at IDFA and we had the screening at Tuschinski, this legendary cinema in Amsterdam, and there were three women who came up to me after the film and I thought that they were old friends, but they didn’t know each other before the screening, but they happened to sit next to each other. After the film, they just opened up to each other and started to share their emotions and they talked for a half hour and then they came to me to share this. I encouraged them to make an appointment for future to meet again, and who knows? A beautiful friendship can start from that. But I’m amazed by how the local can be so universal and how much there is solidarity there is and people who recognize themselves in these stories. At the same time, it gives joy, but it also gives sadness, of course, because there is so much pain and shame that we share, but these feelings are all inside me.
“Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” opens on November 24th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and in New York at IFC Center. A full list of theaters and dates is here.
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