Smoke Sauna Sisterhood: Award-Winning Doc Goes Inside Estonia's Sacred Saunas

By Liz Braun

Rating: A

Saunas are sacred places in Estonia. 

In Smoke Sauna Sisterhood — a documentary of, for and by women — filmmaker Anna Hints offers an inside look at traditional smoke huts in her country, safe spaces used by women since ancient times for birth and death and everything in-between. 

This is a celebration of sisterhood set in the mystical saunas, places so imbued with nature and spirituality that they are on the UNESCO list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was first shown in Toronto at Hot Docs 2023. Hints’ seven-year journey to making the film is rooted in her own childhood, where time spent with her grandmother was her introduction to the smoke sauna culture of southern Estonia and to the power of the tiny, womb-like spaces where women gather to cleanse body and soul. 

The film is her first feature. Among many awards, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was named best documentary at Sundance and at the European Film Awards.

It has also been honoured for cinematography. The film shows only one or two faces, concentrating on the remarkable atmosphere inside the sauna and on the women’s voices as they tell intimate stories about their lives. There’s no shortage of naked female flesh on view, but it is painterly rather than erotic. A primal original score from folk trio EETER — writer/director Hints is the vocalist — in a collaboration with composer Edvard Egilsson, adds greatly to the overall hypnotic quality of the film. 

In the sauna, women talk about formative and sometimes traumatic life events. The sauna itself comes with history, revered as a special gathering place where women came in the past to give birth or to wash and prepare bodies for burial. Filmed over five years, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood shows the seasons change as the women embrace the age-old traditions of the sauna, gathering to scrub their bodies and unburden their souls in the heat, followed by a plunge into icy lake water.

It is a remarkably intimate setting. The talk runs from body image to child bearing, physical and emotional trauma, love and death and the whole damn thing. The film shimmers with heat and flesh and sweat, as ever-deeper layers of personal experience slowly come to the surface in crucial conversation. 

The women's stories are devastating. And familiar.

Hints began filming the women with no idea what stories they were going to tell. That’s how much she respects the power of smoke sauna. 

She’ll make a believer out of you, too.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was Estonia's official submission for Best International Film at the Academy Awards.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood: Written and directed by Anna Hints, with Kadi Kivilo, Maria Meresaar and Elsa Saks. Opens in Toronto January 26 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Theatre.