“In Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, the Women are Voicing Out Their Deepest Feelings and Thoughts, But Here in Sauna Day the Focus is On the Unsaid”: Anna Hints and Tushar Prakash on their Cannes-Debuting short Sauna Day

When I last interviewed Estonian filmmaker Anna Hints it was to discuss her Sundance 2023-premiering Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, which would go on to win the World Cinema Documentary Competition Directing Award. (It also nabbed Best Documentary at the 36th European Film Awards on its way to becoming Estonia’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars.) The film offers quite a unique peek into a UNESCO-designated tradition that for centuries has allowed women like those the director (and contemporary artist and experimental folk musician) respectfully lenses to bond, heal and reveal in a safe space of smoke and sweat. And now Hints’s painstakingly crafted short Sauna Day, co-directed with her “partner in life and art,” Indian filmmaker Tushar Prakash (who also served as an editor on Smoke Sauna Sisterhood), transports us to “the world of Southern Estonian men who go to the dark-intimate space of a smoke sauna after a hard day’s work” (per the mysterious synopsis). But if you’re expecting a sort of “brotherhood” followup, think again. Not only is Sauna Day not a look at a group of guys experiencing emotional release as they free themselves from society’s gender-specific constraints, it’s not even purely nonfiction with two very intense actors woven into the otherwise vérité proceedings. Which admittedly made a certain sense to me since Sauna Day happens to include what could be viewed as some hot and sweaty catharsis of the homoerotic sort. Just after the 13-minute film’s Cannes (Critics’ Week Special Screening) debut, Filmmaker reached out to the unconventional duo to learn all about collaborating on such an unusual and rather provocative project.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

Shame and punishment: Stormy Daniels takes the stand

While Israel’s war against Palestine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine still make above-the-fold news here in the US – mostly in the hyperbolic navel-gazing form of whether or not the former will tank Biden’s chances in this year’s election and thus end democracy as we know it, the latter whether the far-right wing of Congress will eventually withhold arms sales to Ukraine and thus tank its existence – it’s not the news. No, far more riveting than body counts a world away seems to be the real-life soap opera unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom, the recent star of which has been not the corrupt businessman and reality tv star on trial, but the savvy businesswoman and porn star at the center of the former president’s twisty election interference scheming. And to read the rest of my not-so-hot take visit Global Comment.