The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs in-person from 3/1 through 3/3 at the Emerson Paramount Center and will continue virtually through 3/18. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage!
“Water, take the pain away,” chant, moan, and cry a group of women from various life stages in a steamy wooden sauna, “Water, take the pain away.” In the forests of Võromaa of Southeast Estonia, smokehouse saunas have the power to heal. This old Estonian cultural tradition, inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List for the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is the setting for director Anna Hints’s feature-length documentary Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, a considerably moving empathic film where the communal ritual becomes cathartically sacred and essentially human.
Filmed over a seven year span in a half dozen saunas, the camera rarely glimpses the faces of the women who spill their life stories with one another in complete nudity. They share stories of dick pics and breast cancer, late-life sexual awakening and rape, mothers and abortion in front of a camera that pushes right against their sweaty thighs and sticky sauna skin. In this enclosed crowded space, the women continuously embrace, hold, and caress one another as if in a state of religious confession, each body indistinguishable from the next. Whose leg is that? Whose hand is playing with her hair? Where does one body begin and another end? In this tangledness—where stories are heard and people are seen—love untangles lifetimes of agony and isolation through the nearly anthropological sharing of personal yarns.
Cinematographer Ants Tammik asserts himself as an inspired source for the future of Baltic film. He illustrates a painterly understanding of light and the ways it illuminates bodies like the subjects in Rembrandt’s best works that flourish with strong shadows and moody key lighting. The women move about freely and sprawl their limbs onto each other as the smoke pushes in and out of the edges of the screen, so that despite the closeness of the interior sauna spaces where the vast majority of the film is spent, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood never traps itself into claustrophobia.
Respecting the wishes of the women, the filmmakers presented their subjects with the option to not show their faces—something of an oddity in the Western documentary filmmaking industry that has become all-so dominated by the journalistic impulses of historian-documentarians. One also wonders how un-invasive and careful Tammik must have been as a man in his late 20s and early 30s in such vulnerable women-centric spaces to merit the trust of the women spilling their hearts to one another on film. To put it bluntly, had he in any way made the women feel uncomfortable, the excellence of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood would never have been possible in the first place. Sometimes good filmmaking follows old-fashioned human decency.
The film concludes with a detailed description by one of the brave women of her own rape. She lays on the wood and covers her face with her hands as she describes how an old man picked her up while hitchhiking and raped her. With tremendous recollection of the most seemingly irrelevant details, she sets the scene and recalls everything: the music in the car, the sounds of barking dogs, the words of the rapist. When she leaves the attacker, she cries in a ditch on the side of a road for some time. Two men stop their car, she asks for help and tells them of her rape, they briefly console her… and then proceed to take advantage of her once more. The woman minces no words. Mixed with cries, pauses, and even laughs, and interrupted with the empathy-rich questions of other women, her storytelling is the twisted inverse of the great descriptive-erotic scene of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona where no sexual images are ever presented. The dialogue-only form of storytelling demands greater reflection, and even imagination, from its audience. The format, without a B-roll or any form of visual departure from the storyteller, also allows the all-consuming scene to hold a compassionate visual contradiction to contrast with the painful words. The silent presence of the other women in the smoke sauna, their holding and consoling of their friend, refreshes and gives life to the healing potential of sisterhood.
The documentary represented Estonia at the 96th Academy Awards, though it failed to make the shortlist. It’s already well on its way to becoming one of the most awarded Estonian films in history, including a win at Sundance for the World Cinema Documentary – Directing Award, and it may very well help establish a more secure place for Estonian film with the international cinephile audience. At the very least, there is nothing else like it—and in a cinema culture defined by sequels, prequels, and uninspired cash grabs, the badge of uniqueness must be worth commemorating.
The only restoration at this year’s festival, Four White Shirts (1967) challenged my own understanding of Soviet film history—something with which I’m at least casually familiar—with a style and energy borrowed from the European New Wave movements of the 1960s. Blending pop sensibilities, an experimental spirit, and a confident ideal of personal liberty, this Latvian language film has just as much in common, if not more, with Jean-Luc Godard than The Cranes Are Flying (1957). And the music rocks!
The title comes from one of the many songs in the film (it’s basically a musical) sung by Cēzars Kalniņš, played by Uldis Pūcītis or “The Latvian Harrison Ford,” and his edgy band Optimisti (The Optimists). Pūcītis admittedly has a similar sort of smug charm as Ford, tapered with a talkative, monologue-ish style that reminds me of the more modern Simon Pegg. By day, Cēzars repairs telephones, but that’s not what concerns the local communist party officials. His lyrics, we are told, fall outside of acceptable aesthetic standards and are borderline pornographic. (They aren’t really, at least not in English translation.) As he fights to keep his songs the way they are, other band members willingly concede to the authorities and he must use the power of good music to transform the hearts of his strict critics (or attempt to).
Riga of the 1960s bustles like London or Toronto– although, as an American, I’m possibly just hyper-attuned to robust public transport systems where trains and buses pollute the background just like human extras and always give the sense of this being a city where people have places to be. At night, the evaporating images of Kalniņš’s Riga share quite a bit with Martin Scorsese’s mesmerizing (and more decadent) New York. The costume and make-up departments never let up on the swagger. One character confidently wears dark sunglasses indoors and everyone’s hair is always perfectly imperfect. Līga Liepiņa stands out as Bella, Cēzars’s red-headed girlfriend who could make Target pajamas stylish. The members of Optimisti, even in dress and sex appeal, stand out for their non-conforming individuality.
I was amused by the lyricality of Four White Shirts, moving swiftly with a typical New Wave ease between tonal shifts. One moment, the music can be hilariously frivolous: “In spite of his scoliosis, the poet wrote a song.” At other times, the film as a whole can be movingly romantic. In my favorite scene, after the lyrics “They danced one summer, and the lights shine still,” Ralf (Pauls Butkēvičs) sings “We each had our one summer” to Bella. (Cēzars wrote the song.) She carries his tune forward and repeats the line before the song moves on to imagery of changing seasons. The simplicity sells the emotions. It’s a beautiful though brief moment and a cute Baltic contribution to the somewhat adjacent cinematic traditions of martyred lovers and love regret.
The “Four White Shirts” of the title song seems to refer to the social environment in which a man would, to use an English cliche, “wear different hats” with different authority figures. “If a man has four white shirts, he can go through life without worry,” Optimisti sings in the first five minutes. Neither the censors in the film, first provoked by culture minister Anita Sondore (Dina Kuple), nor in real life appreciated this clear anti-authoritarian skid. The film was immediately banned and only ever saw one party executive screening until the relaxing of censorship under Mikhail Gorbachev over twenty years later. A restoration was completed by the National Film Centre of Latvia and Locomotive Productions (Latvia) in 2017 to celebrate the 95th birthday of director Rolands Kalniņš. He lived to be 100 and died in 2022. The Boston Baltic Film celebrates his life and filmmaking with a contextually rich tribute.
Let’s be honest: you’ll probably never have another chance to see Four White Shirts on the big screen. The simple opportunity to catch this restoration on Emerson’s screen is a notable contribution to New England cinephilia. It’s also a testament to the health of the arts scene in Boston and a reason to pause and celebrate the presence of this thriving regional cinema festival.
Four White Shirts
1967
dir. Rolands Kalniņš
77 min.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
2023
dir. Anna Hints
89 min.
Both films screen in person on March 3rd. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood screens at 1:30 PM and Four White Shirts at 7:10 PM. The latter will also be available digitally.
Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online, and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.
