The moist footprints, loose towels, meditative chanting, and chiming laughter of the women in the film all lend us their own poignancy simply by being there.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

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.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 3, 2024

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

| Jul 4, 2024

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

| Mar 4, 2024

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.

| Original Score: B | Jan 27, 2024

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is primarily a sort of group therapy session, much of it exposing the damaging effect on individuals of a patriarchal society. Such revelations have a universality...

| Jan 8, 2024

A fascinating soundscape - created by Hints in collaboration with Icelandic composer Edvard Eglisson - complements the conversations. A magnificent breakout.

| Jan 3, 2024

[the] places where stories are exchanged, wounds are unveiled, and laughter becomes a balm. This is where Smoke Sauna Sisterhood rises, as light as steam, as tangible as truth.

| Dec 14, 2023

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

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 4, 2023

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.

| Original Score: B- | Dec 2, 2023

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

| Nov 29, 2023

Strikes a bold balance between intense intimacy and respectful distance.

| Nov 27, 2023

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.

| Nov 25, 2023

... 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

| Nov 24, 2023

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.

| Original Score: C | Nov 24, 2023

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

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 23, 2023

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.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 22, 2023

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, then, stands as a rare, polished gem: a feminist film that reveals the infinite faces of womanhood without ever exposing or demystifying them.

| Nov 22, 2023

An intimate feminist documentary from Anna Hints with women who cleanse their bodies, minds and spirits in a traditional Estonian sauna, a sacred place where women give birth, prepare the dead for burial and relieve stress in their lives.

| Nov 22, 2023

Warm, tender and unflinchingly honest.

| Nov 20, 2023