Ken Wardrop's HIS & HERS took the World Cinema Documentary Cinematography Prize for Kate McCullough and Michael Lavelle. The film is composed of interviews with women of all ages from across Ireland.
John Anderson, writing behind Variety's pay wall, offered this review:
"Simple ideas are often the best -- and sometimes turn out not to be so simple. "His & Hers," a delightful, disarming documentary, consists on a very basic level of soundbites from 70 Irish women, through whom we learn about potato peeling, naming babies and the very domestic politics of the TV remote. But it's also a profound rumination on infancy, adolescence, infirmity, mortality and, most emphatically, the relations between the sexes...
As deceptively moving as it may be, helmer Ken Wardrop's directorial debut is also rigorously and remarkably cinematic: The colors, the placement of objects (often in pairs), and the interplay of camera angles, light and movement are all choreographed to provide fluidity from subject to subject and home to home. There are no startling differences among the women -- all are white, Irish and middle-class, but that's not entirely an accident of geography. "His & Hers" is about the universality of experience and the subtlety of differences among people who may at first glance seem homogenous, but who are individuated by their manner, stories and even accents."
The A.V. Club's Noel Murray calls the film "sublime in its simplicity":
"HIS & HERS is far more artfully shot than most modern docs, and the way Wardrop connects up patterns of behavior resembles one of Chris Ware’s multi-tiered comic strip rendered in the more straightforward medium of cinema. Plus, it remains consistently fascinating to study the faces of these women and the homes they’ve made for themselves, and to hear them share stories that are funny, mundane, or profoundly sad. I can’t call the movie a one-of-a-kind—Krzysztof Kieslowski made a similar documentary, and some structuralist experimental filmmakers have used similar techniques—but it is remarkably assured about what it wants to do, and it achieves the emotional sweep that Wardrop is going for."
Ned Prickett of Boston's Blast Magazine concurs:
"The results are simply wonderful. Wardrop does a tremendous job framing his movie in a way that each vignette flows seamlessly into the next. He uses the effective technique of having most of his subjects enter and exit through stairs. The film opens with a toddler opening a safety gate and climbing the stairs with quite determination. Each subsequent shot of older girls calls back to that first mischievous toddler and suggests the experiences each of these women have had since they too were crawling carelessly past gates designed to project their fragility."
Alicia Van Couvering, covering the fest for Filmmaker, found herself in tears:
"It is possible that my state of mind influenced the borderline-rapturous, very tearful viewing experience I had watching Ken Wardrop's HIS & HERS but I am certain that it's a wonderful film."
Alan Bacchus, of Daily Film Dose, makes it unanimous:
"Wardrop’s sense of humour and overall light tone is evident from the very first interview with a 3 month old infant in a crib. Of course the baby can’t talk, but its just the first form of life when a female comes into contact with a man - her father staring down at her in her crib. The next set of interviews are with young girls aged 1, 2, and 3, responding to offscreen questions telling stories about their dad or brother which is surprisingly profound and engaging from their unique point of view...
And by the end, when the last elderly woman reflects on her life as a woman in relation to her family which is below her age, I was reminded of that great children’s book “Love You Forever” by Robert N. Munsch about the child born and loved by her mother, then gradually grows up and has her own daughter to care for and eventually in elder age must be cared for and loved by her own daughter. Like Munsch‘s book ‘His and Hers’ is a great and profound story about this cycle of life, love and family."
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