Sunday Children

Perfectly judged documentary-style realism about an unprepossessing couple whose desperate desire for a child leads them to approach an unwed young mother-to-be with a view to adopting her baby. Agencies demand too long a wait and the husband wants to pretend his wife's really pregnant. Without offering overt judgment, Holland uses this 'everyday' plot to show how the husband and wife unwittingly lay traps for themselves, and also, more intriguingly, to explore the complex motives behind parenthood. With work like this, it's not hard to see why Holland became a friend of Kieslowski.