Cannes Critics’ Week (Semaine de la Critique), which runs parallel to the Cannes Film Festival and showcases the work of talented up and coming directors, features a slate of short films in addition to its feature film offerings. It is a great honour to be selected for the prestigious event, which has in past years included the short film debuts of many lauded directors such as François Ozon (Summer Dress), Cesar Augusto Acevedo (Water Steps), and Julia Ducournau (Junior). Among this year’s selections is a special world premiere screening of the short film Sauna Day, from co-directors Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash (The Karma Killings).
Sauna Day is a companion piece of sorts to Hints’ acclaimed documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which premiered at the Sundance Festival in 2023 and established its director as an emerging talent in the documentary field. In addition to winning the Directing Award in that festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood was also selected as the Estonian national entry for the 96thAcademy Awards.
Whereas that film saw Hints draw on her creative background in contemporary art and experimental folk music to cast an artistic eye on the lives of a group of Estonian women swapping stories in the intimacy of a traditional Finnish-style smoke sauna, Sauna Day uses that same setting to cast light on the male experience. Teaming up here with Tushar Prakash (editor of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood), the pair take a fictionalized approach this time around, making an exploration of the intimacy of the unsaid between men in spaces such as these.
Sauna culture is sacred in this part of the world – Hints’ native South-East Estonia – and by teaming up the pair is able to offer at once an outsider’s and insider’s perspective. Hints’ roots are in the indigenous Võro and Seto cultures of the region, allowing the team to work closely with the local community and access the smoke sauna culture in a way that might not otherwise have been possible. Shot in a semi-improvised fashion with a mix of actors and non-actors from the community itself, the (scant) dialogue heard in the film is spoken in both Estonian and Võro, a local dialect.
The film opens on the naked, gleaming bodies of a disparate group of men enjoying the heat of a dark and tiny smoke sauna hidden away somewhere deep in the woods of rural Estonia. The conversation, such as it is, doesn’t stray from the superficial, sticking to banal topics like their recently completed chores and the weather. Their idle chatter is punctuated only by the sounds of the steam sizzling off the sauna rocks, but there is a sense of comfort in this space, with every line and fold visible on the bodies of these men seeming to gesture at a lifetime of untold stories – shared or otherwise.
Shot in a striking chiaroscuro style by Ants Tammik (A Fragile World), the filmmakers somehow succeed in making the world inside this tiny smoke-filled hut feel expansive, rather than confining and claustrophobic. I would imagine that emotionally, that is exactly how this space would feel for these men who have spent lifetimes suppressing the outward expression of their emotions to fit the strictures of the highly patriarchal mindset of the culture in which they reside. While they may not be able to express it outwardly, the sauna provides a safe space for unspoken connections between these men to be forged.
Just such a deep connection between our two central characters – played with depth and restraint by Rasmus Kaljujärv and Agur Seim – reveals itself as the rest of the group moves on, leaving the two alone together. The nature of that connection is a mystery, but the tension and the intimacy between the two is palpable. They move deliberately and wordlessly around each other, clearly practiced in this ritual. The film culminates in a hypnotic sequence as one man administers a traditional nettle whisking to the other, offering them each a much-needed moment of release. As their wives arrive, the men don their clothes once again, ready to face the world outside that sacred space.
Sauna Day has its world premiere at Cannes Critics’ Week.
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