Synopsis

The Pioneer City was the product of both political and societal necessity — and it built and was built with the idea that education has to leave the confines of the ‘school’ and enter the city, i.e. everyday life, and thus produce the ‘new’ human for the new socialist society. When in 1947 groups of voluntary youth brigades gathered on a hillside next to the stream, in the vicinity of Zagreb to build the Pioneer City, besides an architectural plan for a city dedicated to education of the youngest population, little else was certain about what that space would actually be. However, one thing was well understood — it was to be a site of education from the moment the first shovel hit the ground, and it was an experimental school, a laboratory for the pedagogical reform in progress from 1951 to 1961. Layering the fragments of recollections by Jelena Hušman and a history lesson with a historian Sanja Petrović Todosijević over existing spaces, the film asks “what was experimental in the experimental school?” Through the film, authors stumble over the future as a concept which in the past was an inevitability and gave society and its approach to education a clear sense of direction, and which for them stands for uncertainty. The hope for a better future, progress, prosperity and certainty of the future which was foundational for the generation of Jelena Hušman had disappeared and was transferred through the uncertainty of our everyday lives to the non-existent future of new generations.