Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Anna Hints's first feature took the directing prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance in 2023 and then the European Film Award for Best Documentary. The smoke sauna tradition of Võromaa, in southern Estonia, is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list; Hints grew up with it and spent seven years filming inside one.

The film has no interviews, no narration and almost no faces in the conventional sense. Ants Tammik's camera stays low in the dark, on backs, hands, steam, the ash-blackened timber of the walls, so that the women are heard more than seen. Across a year of seasons — snow outside, then a lake, then snow again — the conversation moves from laughter about men to accounts of illness, of coercion, of the first time somebody told them their body was wrong. It is entirely unforced; the sauna is a place where these things are said, and Hints simply waited.

Critics described it as the rare documentary that finds a genuinely new form for a familiar subject, and Estonia submitted it for the international feature Oscar. What stays with you is the sound design — Edward Lucian Dryhurst-Smith and Hints built the film's rhythm out of breathing, water on hot stones and the crack of birch — and the fact that a film shot almost entirely in the dark ends up being about visibility.