#SmokeSauna is an ode to the female body, who frees himself from the darkness of the violence he has suffered to soar into the clear light, to the transparency of the water.
If in the first shot we see the archetype of the feminine (the woman, as it has been portrayed for centuries, from the male point of view: rounded shapes with a newborn on her lap), Smoke Sauna deals with deconstructing this image of women, giving voice to songs and sighs, confessions and laments. Already in this first shot, indeed, the body is stripped: we are witnessing an examination of female reality.
The Estonian director, Anna Hints, he tells us about a culture he knows well. For seven years he worked on this documentary, starting from her "sisters" and widening the circle of acquaintances, listening to the voices of foreign women, which have gradually become part of history. A bond of trust had to be built before we could film. “To bring out vulnerability you must first be able to be vulnerable”, said the director in the interview given after winning the award for Best Director for Documentaries at the Sundance Festival in 2023.
The camera is welcomed into the intimacy of the sauna ritual. (The sauna tradition in Voromaa, Estonia, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.) First we need to break the ice, take ice water. That water will be poured onto the boiling stones inside the wooden structure, a small cabin, to create steam. One woman will whip the other with leaves, while this, relaxing, she will find a sister who listens to her.
Female silhouettes, in the shade, they tell their stories. The faces, the faces, the expressions will come later. It's the bellies, the thighs, arms, the hands – who caress each other, they rub, they console themselves – to accompany us in the story.
However singular and intimate the experiences narrated, these voices are universal.
They talk about their childhood, of their youth: “The most important thing for a woman was to be appreciated by men: then, the tits.” The male gaze on the bodies of these women remains central; from the influence of porn, to family violence, each describes her personal struggle to assert herself. “My sister was considered beautiful, io, Not being gifted with beauty I had to, consequently be good at school.” The perception of the body; the expectation of having to be liked, to be attractive: the group of naked women, get hot, Welded, vents the weight of man's desire, thus reclaiming their body and their identity.
The woman's body is like the earth: it is intended as "a resource". One of these figures reveals that she no longer has a uterus, “They also removed my breasts, they took everything from me but they won't take my soul away." For too long we have tried to define the role of women according to schemes that do not allow the freedom of the individual.
These are not stories lived only by women who are told but experiences that appeal to women's experiences. And it's the sauna itself, this all-female ritual, which allows you to tell your story in the dark, to open up.
The director dedicates the film to all her sisters; the sisters thanks to whom he built the documentary but we feel that his "embrace" extends to the entire circumference of the world, to a universal sisterhood.
Valentina Vignoli