Hulahop continues to “change the world”

For instance, the episode “I am a Gypsy too” will show how a young Roma woman Anita fights against the system aided by a group of volunteers. Anita and her team launched an afterschool pilot project aimed at helping Roma children and other children from troubled families write homework, learn foreign languages, prepare simple meals, adopt health and sanitary habits and develop empathy. Anita is 24 and lives in the Peščenica neighbourhood. She graduated from high school in photography and loves travelling. The idea for this pilot project came to her when she once waited at the traffic light. A Roma woman approached her car and asked for some money. Anita answered in Roma language: “I am a Gypsy too”. The
woman did not believe her. When Anita offered to take her home and give her a bath and a change of clothes, the woman refused. It is difficult to change one’s lifestyle, says Anita, but that does not mean one should not try.

The episode “Great Plan” will show what happens when a group of scientists and students, people who spent most of their lives in classrooms and concrete buildings, decide to embrace rural life and work in a remote village in the province of Lika. The property located in the Velika Plana village, in the close proximity of the Velebit Nature Park, provides a venue for the small scientific community to participate in an experiment aiming to show that it is possible to be organised and operative according to the principles not depending on institutions, state funds, complicated legal regulations or money.

Another episode, with the title “What is happening in Vukovar” portrays the lives of young people of Vukovar. They are no different than other young people in other parts of Croatia. Except, of course, they live in Vukovar. The city destroyed nineteen years ago by thousands of missiles, with more than three thousand human casualties and over thirty per cent of the population still living elsewhere, while those who are back are often scarred for life, still eyeing their neighbours cautiously because they are of different nationality. The Vukovar people born in 1991 or later do not know the Vukovar “as it used to be”, so frequently mentioned and described wistfully and with nostalgia. Their city is the Vukovar of today. A dozen of them are visiting Vukovar today to create a map which would encompass all the places offering something to the young. Their map “conquers” the city and reveals what thecity has to offer them and what they, the young, can offer to it. What is left and what has changed for good. What is really happening today in Vukovar.