Part of the Documentary Competition at RiverRun International Film Festival, His & Hers is an Irish film that weaves together snippets of interviews with Irish women, mainly about the men in their lives.  The interviews start with the youngest subjects and work chronologically to the oldest of those interviewed, and the result is interesting if not consistently engaging in a conventional narrative sense.  I recommend the film for doc lovers, however, and do appreciate its unusual structure.

But the structure — interviewing girls and women in their homes and weaving bits of the interviews together — creates a thematic issue for me.  The women are confined to the domestic sphere and frame their own lives through comments about their fathers, brothers, boyfriends, fiances, husbands, and sons, all of which means their lives are defined (in this film) by the men in them.

Screenings April 16, 17, 18, and 23 at RiverRun.  See the website (http://www.riverrunfilm.com) for details.