Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Name: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2023
Duration: 89 min

Anna Hints20231h 29mDocumentary

Why we chose it

Winner of a directing award at Sundance, Anna Hints’s documentary listens in on women’s confessions, intimacies and jokes in a UNESCO-listed Võrumaa smoke sauna in Estonia. It was in one that Hints heard what her grandmother said the day before her grandfather’s funeral. Sisterhood without shame.

Synopsis

In a smoke sauna in Võrumaa, in southern Estonia, women leave their clothes in the changing room, and their surnames with them. They talk in the darkness and the heat: one tells of a sexual assault, another of a lifetime spent ashamed of her own body. They lash themselves with birch switches, run out into the cold water and come back into the heat of the sauna.