Mother and child reunion: filmmaker Christopher Munch's The Sleepy Time Gal, debuting on Sundance Channel, uncovers secrets from his own past. (television).

There are a thousand words for loneliness, and out writer-director Christopher Munch seems to understand them all. He's not well-known outside the world of film aficionados--chalk that up to his dreamy, subtle sensibility and his intense aversion to the Hollywood hustle. Still, he's hustler enough to have made feature films out of several arrestingly personal narratives: 1992's The Hours and Times imagines a wistful weekend between John Lennon and gay manager Brian Epstein; 1997's Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day pictures the last days of a railroad, with Michael Stipe as the gay one among the lonesome souls who run it. Now comes The Sleepy Time Gal, an astute chronicle of unexpressed love premiering March 29 on Sundance Channel.

Munch acknowledges one secret of his success: his knack for cranking out lush-looking movies on microbudgets. "The shooting [on The Sleepy Time Gall took place over about 2 1/2 years simply because I didn't have a big enough chunk of money at any one point to do the whole thing," says the soft-spoken 39-year-old. "It really was held together by chewing gum and a lot of care. Every time I do one of these things, I forswear ever doing it again. It really takes its toll."

Munch also knows how to attract talent and show it off to superb advantage. Sleepy Time is a roundelay of unfulfilled desires: Frances (an inspired Jacqueline Bisset) is a beautiful woman, now dying, who wants to heal the emotional damage she's left in her wake. That means facing the lover (Seymour Cassell) with whom she had a daughter, long ago given up for adoption; the petulant gay son (Nick Stahl) who jealously resents even the little he knows of her freewheeling past; and, most poignant, the young attorney (Martha Plimpton) who's searching for the birth mother she'll likely never find.

The movie's emotional blows hit home, and no wonder: It's largely autobiographical. Says Munch: "[The film] had its inspiration in some of my family history that I wasn't really very acquainted with--particularly the illegitimate daughter whom my mother had borne as a young woman and about whom I knew nothing during the course of my mother's life."

It's hard to believe, given the longing that pervades The Sleepy Time Gal, that Munch hasn't gone all out to locate his sister. "I did make information available via a registry in the event that she ever wanted to know anything about her birth mother," he says. "But I don't feel personally any great compulsion to know this woman. I realize that she's probably in her late 40s now, so I think she probably has made whatever peace she's needed to make with her past."

Yet the question seems obvious: Isn't The Sleepy Time Gal really a message in a bottle? Doesn't Munch hope his sister will see the film and pick up a phone? "No," he says firmly. But, as with a character in a Christopher Munch movie, his eyes suggest it's not that simple. A single word unlocks a shimmering world of possibilities.