His & Hers 2009

Irish women talk about the men they love in this simple and simply affecting award-winning documentary. Little girls talk about their dads, bigger girls talk about their boyfriends, married women talk about their husbands and their sons, and widows talk about the husbands they’ve lost and the sons who keep an eye on them. It sounds sentimental, but it really isn’t. Filmmaker Ken Wardrop captures appealingly unforced expressions of affection, exasperation and insight from 70 interview subjects, filmed in the comfort of their kitchens, living rooms and hallways across the Irish midlands. Following a simple chronology from cradle to the grave, he finds something transcendent in genteel, ordinary experience. — BG

“Ken Wardrop clearly takes pleasure in the art of the interview, setting up his shots with unmistakable tenderness and drawing from his subjects the kind of casual candidness that transforms the mundane into the remarkable... Every moment is spot-on: touching, funny, modest, timeless.” — Nora Ankrum, Austin Chronicle

“His & Hers has the sweetly seductive nature of a Once; the audience is lulled into these womens’ parlours, as it were… It’s only after you’ve left their front rooms, their cosy pine kitchens, that you realise you’ve watched the whole of life fly by, with its biggest hopes and dreams there, naked to the eye. These capable women, the ‘ladies of the Irish midlands’, are an easy lot to be around.” — Fionnuala Halligan, Screendaily