Savvusanna sõsarad
**½/****
directed by Anna Hints
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Angelo Muredda “The soul cannot be cut away,” a woman says of her cancer surgery early in Anna Hints’s Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, an evocative and visually striking look at a group of women finding resilience in the face of trauma through community, storytelling, and ritual at a smoke sauna deep in the forest, somewhere in the south of Estonia. Hints’s film makes a timely companion piece of sorts to Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, another dialogue-centred chamber drama about generations of women’s pain and endurance set in a single, remote space. Where Polley’s film is a heavily scripted actors’ showcase reminiscent at times of a talky Stanley Kramer social-issues picture, Hints’s is a more tentative affair. The unnamed women’s stories drip out of them not in crackling monologues but in halting improvised anecdotes–about being perceived as women (first by their mothers, then by men), about their taboo feelings on sexuality and reproductive rights, and about their bare survival against the vagaries of illness, social repression, and sexual violence.
Hints’s project can feel abstract to the point of obscurity at times, with the women’s identities, the nature of the restorative ritual they’re undergoing, and the geography of the surroundings all reading a bit general. By design, the film comes across as a universalist fable about womanhood and solidarity in a unique but vaguely defined space, where their distinct subjectivities blur upon entrance as the camera roams from one body to the next in the dimly lit, smoky interior, rarely settling on their faces while they speak. That conceptual haziness is nicely balanced, however, against the specificity of the women’s stories, which alternate between good-humoured and poignant. The peculiar and harrowing details of these narratives often puncture the film’s lilting, poetic aesthetic, which is defined by details such as the infrequent chanting on the soundtrack, the lyrical images of beads of sweat forming on a woman’s back, and quiet, procedural interludes where we see the space being prepared for their visit. Though Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is ultimately a vessel for the women’s discursive exorcism of the things gnawing away at their bodies and souls, it’s also impeccably shot, boasting painterly compositions of the women at rest, in thought, and in community that invest their dialogues with the dignity and loftiness of Plato’s Symposium.
