They love each other, they want to get married, and they want to have children.
But these two are different, and they will be parents with limits. Kata, the mother, has learning difficulties and can barely read and write. Laszlo, the father, was rejected by his Gipsy family as a baby and grew up in various institutions for the disabled. He is is deaf and dumb. Laci, their firstborn, however, has an IQ of 138…

In the late-nineties the head of one institution for the mentally disabled in Csömör, Hungary, allowed and encouraged its residents to have partners, get married and even have children. Although this progressive idea was never officially considered an ‘experiment’, it was certainly breaking new ground.

Kata’s mother had died when she was sixteen and Kata had practically kept the house and looked after her father, who was a violent man known for his heavy drinking bouts. Kata became one of the first inhabitants of the Csömör “Cooperation Rehabilitation Centre”. When Laszlo was transferred there at the age of 26, the two fell in love and decided to get married, against the wishes of the girl’s father, who wanted a more worthy husband for his daughter than the deaf-and-dumb Gypsy Laszlo. The institution supported the couple’s wish for marriage and helped to arrange the wedding. Soon, Kata got pregnant and, in line with the policy of the institution, she was allowed to keep the child. She gave birth to a healthy boy in May 1998.

The film covers a period of eight years from the marriage to the second pregnancy. At the beginning the intention was to see how the couple copes with raising their child. It soon became a long-term project, and a close bond was formed between the filmmaker and the family. Especially the little boy, Laci, wanted to spend time with the filmmaker also off-screen. The feeling was mutual... it was impossible not to warm to this intelligent boy with his generous, loving nature.

The film concentrates on Laci’s development over a period of eight years, as well as that of his sisters’, who was born three years after him. The unpredictability of fate is clearly demonstrated in the difference between the two children: Laci is an extremely bright, intelligent and highly gifted child while little Kati still has difficulties of talking at the age of almost five years. While Laci was going to the nursery at the age of 18 months, little Kati was rejected from kindergarten for being incontinent and under-developed at the age of three.

The crucial moral dilemma the filmmaker was trying to entangle over the years is this: where is the limit when the issue of human rights for the disabled conflicts with the interest of the healthy child?

Budapest (comp. '07, special mention '08), Prague, Riga, DocAviv