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.

This is staggeringly good documentary filmmaking, and Hints artfully sketches something truly unique and absorbing, containing evocative sound design by Tanel Kadalipp and graceful editing by Tushar Prakash.

a considerably moving empathic film where the communal ritual becomes cathartically sacred and essentially human.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a celebration of healing and the human spirit, a cinematic space rooted in prayer, meditation, and mystic contemplation.

By the end, the many images of steam, smoke and fire reveal a striking metaphor for the participants in what we learn is a centuries-old practice of purifying the soul. Does it work? I cannot say. But it certainly makes you sweat.