May 3, 2010: Steam of Life
Steam of Life is a Finnish documentary about what men talk about in the sauna. This is a meticulous and reverential effort, with footage from hectic cityscapes setting the stage for scenes in crowded public saunas in urban areas, while long slow establishing shots of forests and water precede scenes in the more quirky and sometimes makeshift rural saunas.
The meat of the film is, of course, the discussion itself. Prompted only occasionally by the filmmakers, strangers open up with sometimes surprisingly candid and tragic stories from their past, and their physical nakedness only serves to emphasize the therapeutic value of stripping away the layers and getting down to a real human connection. One man had twin children and tells of the death of one of them, one man recalls his inability to prevent a fatal mining accident, and another has stories of a violent step-parent.
In the Q&A afterwards, the filmmakers covered all the expected territory, from questions about technical details (how the cameras and film were placed in the sauna a couple of hours before filming in order to get up to temperature and prevent fogging or equipment damage), interview technique (half of the material they got was unexpected, from acquaintances of the people they had planned to film), and the editing process (a tender sequence with a husband and wife together, to emphasize the importance of having someone to care about, was placed at the start rather than at the end as planned because it would have been out of place following the powerful final story by one interviewee).
Steam of Life is a reminder of how human connections are what matters in life.
Water on hot rocks becomes steam.
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