Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

It's worth seeing, but it's way over arty.

Strikes a bold balance between intense intimacy and respectful distance.

Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.

The film transmits an immediate and powerful experience of profound communion between people bound by shared hardship.

Most of the film is exquisitely composed of images of body parts, sometimes an arm or breasts, sometimes a row of knees, all illuminated like Old Master paintings to allow us to appreciate the quiet intimacy and profound beauty of human bodies.

It’s an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.

What might, in an oil painting, represent ‘women bathing’ here represents the endurance of an entire community.

Anna Hints’ Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a truly intense ... originally crafted documentary account of a group of women who get together in a sauna in the woods to be there for one another and help each other heal from the trauma in their lives.

... a window into the lives of these women willing to bare their minds and bodies without reservation, finding moments both hilarious and heartbreaking that feel specific yet universal

Ultimately, the film is kind of limp, as if these women’s bodies are, despite the sensitivity on-hand, conveyed too much like academic objects.