Produced in 1983, Robert Gliński’s film was shelved for four years by Polish authorities after the introduction of martial law. Interestingly, it had been inspired by a Polish émigré Roma Mahieu’s Argentine play Juegos a la hora de la siesta, which had been banned by the Argentine military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Reminiscent of René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), the film is set in a bombed-out Warsaw courtyard on a summer Sunday morning in 1953 following Stalin’s death. Their parents away at church or attending the memorial procession, a group of children play ghoulish and macabre games in an imitation of the violent adult world. The children’s innocent ‘sunday pranks’ set off a chain of events with grave implications when one set of parents is arrested by the secret police and their son is taken away to a home. Even if the premise seems a bit obvious, the film succeeds as a classic piece of social realism and captures a sense of menace and doom in 1980s Poland.
Gliński graduated from the National Film School of Łódź in 1979 and started out as a documentarian. Niedzielne igraszki was his feature debut and was produced by the Karol Irzykowski Studio, with Gliński as one of its founders. It was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1987.

Neil McGlone