BBFF Dispatch #1: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023) dir. Anna Hints / Four White Shirts (1967) dir. Rolands Kalniņš
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!
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
“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.
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.
Four White Shirts
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).
Continue reading at the Boston Hassle.