YOUR SPACE: European vacation with flavor of Easter

EDITOR'S NOTE: Andrea Brown was on vacation in Europe. She wasn't supposed to be working. But she simply couldn't resist finding people with stories to tell.

It's hard for us here in church city to imagine no freedom of religion.

It's hard for Slobodan Karajlovic to forget.

The 34-year-old Serbian film director grew up in communist Yugoslavia. This secular upbringing inspired his latest short film, "Easter Eggs." It's about a boy whose father is loyal to the Communist Party and whose mother is loyal to her faith.

On Easter, as soon as the dad heads to work as a border officer, the mom shuts the curtains to hide colored eggs and secretly worship with the boy and his sister.

The dad unexpectedly comes home and goes completely mad. He could be jailed. How dare they! He orders his son to hand over the Easter eggs.

Sure, the boy fears his dad, but it's his find. Nobody's going to take it from him, not even the big man in the uniform of power.

Rather than obey, the boy shoves eggs into his mouth and nearly chokes to death. The strife between his parents vanishes as they unite to save their child.

The next year, mother and children celebrate Easter without any lip from Dad. That's a happy ending, Serbian style.

It won't likely be in a theater near us anytime soon.

We saw the DVD on a laptop in a Budapest, Hungary, hotel during a six-country, 18-day EF Educational Tours European excursion.

Slobodan the film director was also our tour director.

We were his cast of characters, of sorts. He was tasked with herding and nurturing 43 clueless Americans, mostly teens, and dealing with our pampered ways. He comforted us through a world of pay toilets and no ice cubes.

He orchestrated the madness of food, shelter, transit and lost luggage. I didn't have to know the five languages he spoke to know what "Oh, sheet" meant when he called around Austria trying to get the suitcase I left behind at a Vienna hotel. But that's another story.

Slobodan (pronounced "slow-bo-don") would walk so fast he got nicknamed "slow-down, don."

We kept tabs on him by the bright, jelly-bean-colored terry polo shirts that glowed above his tight, drab brown jeans.

His demeanor matched the happy colors of his lemon-lime-berry-tangerine shirts ¬- unless the routine got disrupted.

Hand on hip, brow furrowed, he'd pace like a worried parent if someone went missing or, worse yet, ignored the 7 a.m. wake-up.

A lot of tour guides cry at night, he said. Not him, despite our efforts.

He was educated in Germany, where he got refugee status from the war-torn country that inspires his films. He lives in London.

He does a few tours a year so he can do his art. It's the Easter egg he refuses to give up.