Sauna Day

Anna Hints, now co-directing with Tushar Prakash (The Karma Killings), returns to the elemental environment of a southern Estonian smoke sauna for her latest short. Swapping the female-centric documentary setting for a male-focused fictional one, while her feature was all about the secrets that are revealed in the shared communal space, this concerns those that might be concealed there.

Shot like a Caravaggio painting by Smoke Sauna Sisterhood cinematographer Ants Tammik - who has perfected the technique of shooting within the challenging environment that a working sauna presents - light shafts in as a group of men relax after coming together to raise a roof. Initially, this could be another documentary, not that the men are in the business of doing much chatting, focused instead on the sauna itself and the job they have just completed. Soon the camera moves, its focus as much on reaction shots as who is doing the talking, indicating we are in a created world.

The film rests on sound design rather than score, so we are made aware of the heat as much from the sizzling noise of the water hitting hot stone as we are from the sight of the sweat on the men. Most leave for the coolness of the lake outside, leaving just two, Jaak (Rasmus Kaljujärv) and Hillar (Agur Seim), who embark on a ritual of their own.

A film that probes at ideas of masculinity and the fluidity that the smoke sauna environment might bring to that, the emphasis is on the physical expression of feelings rather than them being vocalised. The elemental also becomes primal, the heat now from within as well as without. The sauna provides a place where time seems to be suspended, the lake outside a sort of halfway house between it and the everyday. There’s a mysterious element to what unfolds, as it also hovers between several interpretations, and, like Palme d’Or winning short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, there’s a sensation that there’s a bigger story waiting to be told, if Hints and Prakash decide to do so.