Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners to screen at Adelaide Film Festival
A photograph of a gay couple taken in the 1970s inspired Melbourne director Goran Stolevski to make his comedy about an unusual household in North Macedonia.
Melbourne filmmaker Goran Stolevski is being asked to talk quietly. “When I get excited it’s really hard for me to be aware of how loud I am,” says the effusive writer-director with the booming voice. Stolevski, 38, is at the Venice film festival and you can’t blame him for being excited.
His latest film, Housekeeping for Beginners, has just premiered there, hot on the heels of his 2022 films You Won’t Be Alone, the story of a shapeshifting witch in medieval Macedonia, and the Melbourne-set gay drama, Of an Age. All three films were picked up for international distribution by Universal Pictures and Focus Features in the US, while local companies distributed the first two films in Australia. In Venice, the Universal logo scrolled across the screen before his new film started.
“Everyone around me went: ‘Whoa!’ So that was a great moment,” Stolevski says animatedly. “When I came up with the idea that my film would be about all these queers, and with cancer and subtitles, I never envisaged it was going to be something that starts with the Universal logo or that I would work with Focus Features.
“I grew up watching their films like Far from Heaven, Brokeback Mountain and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. I have no idea how it happened but I’m very grateful.”
As well as the endorsement from Universal, Housekeeping for Beginners is a co-production between a wide range of countries – North Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Poland, Sweden and Australia – with funding also via the Adelaide Film Festival, where it will have its Australian premiere later this month. Australia’s Causeway Films, a partner on Stolevski’s two previous films, is also a co-producer on Housekeeping for Beginners.
Stolevski was born in the nation now known as North Macedonia and returned to its capital, Skopje, to make his new film. The surprisingly funny story features Romanian actor Anamaria Marinca (from You Won’t Be Alone) as Dita, a lesbian whose Roma partner Sauda (Alina Serban, also Romanian) is dying from cancer. Dita never wanted to be a mother but is forced to raise Sauda’s two daughters, six-year-old troublemaker Mia and rebellious teen Vanesa.
They live together as a lively makeshift family with their gay male friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor from Serbia) and an array of eccentrics, including flamboyant newcomer Ali (Samson Selim), a Roma youth who stays after spending the night with Toni.
All hell breaks loose when Vanesa, resentful of Dita’s comparatively privileged Kosovar background, calls the authorities to claim she has been kidnapped by a gay cult.
Screen Daily hails the film as “an untamed, densely detailed drama that crackles with so much feral energy, you practically get a static shock”, noting “Stolevski’s confident, distinctive voice as a filmmaker is evident from the outset”.
A photo on Facebook, seen when he was on the way to an interpreting job in a hospital, inspired Stolevski to make the film.
“There was this photo from the 1970s of these two men who were still together 40 years later, in the first house they lived in in Melbourne, and it was two men and eight gay women,” he says.
“Since I was on the way to a place where I really didn’t want to be, that photo was my cocoon, because I was like, ‘I want to be in that house always, but especially right now’.
“I often go into my stories to go somewhere else where I feel kind of safe but even in danger. I wanted to make it about the present and it took me to Macedonia.
“Documenting things is a passion for me. You hope your work makes a change. You want your stories to be captured before they disappear.
“You know, there are queer families already and very diverse families. My passion was documenting it as soon as I had the chance.”
Dzada Selim, who plays Mia, steals the film. “I love that little girl, but I definitely don’t want to have children,” Stolevski chuckles. “I think she needs a directing credit, because there’s no way to tell Dzada what to do. We’d just film and hoped things happened.”
Stolevski, who is married to Australian academic Matthew Page, migrated to Australia with his family just before he started high school. Did it help him fit in that he was starting with new students? “A little bit,” he says.
“But, you know, I was a strange child anywhere. It was not just the gay thing, which I wasn’t conscious of at the time, but I’m girlier than most boys. I’ve learned to hide my mannerisms a little bit because I’d get embarrassed, humiliated.
“I was watching Katharine Hepburn films when I was 12 – you know, I didn’t have friends. Katharine was like my friend.”
Having spent most of his life in Australia, Stolevski says he feels both Australian and Macedonian.
“I think both are in me,” he says. “All my life, I’m trying to live the fullest life possible, which means transcending all the categories – like I’m gay, male and ethnic, and I try to say that I’m both Australian and Macedonian or I’m neither.
“This film was made and set in Macedonia, but it’s built on the awareness of when I left, that I became a migrant. I don’t mean this in a complaining way, but life became different.
“I would go back every two years and it’s been great because you pick up changes very well.”
Before he made his features, Stolevski, who has a creative arts degree from the University of Melbourne and a masters degree in film and television from the Victorian College of the Arts, made 25 short films across 20 years.
Incredibly he wrote his three feature films in two months when he was living in England with Page, who was on a postdoctoral fellowship.
“I went along to be the trophy wife, the lowest-budget trophy wife ever, because we lived in a studio,” he says. “I was feeling a lot of anxiety because I had just turned 30 and my life was going nowhere and I was such a promising child.”
Page accompanied Stolevski to the Venice premiere of Housekeeping for Beginners. “It was actually unfortunate that he had to sit behind me, because of, I don’t know, some rules or protocol. But I kept reaching over.”
He says it’s “infinitely” easier being gay in Australia than in North Macedonia.
“I know that I’m not allowed to touch him in public there, I definitely can’t hold Matty’s hand. I also need to be aware of the unconscious body language. If we seem gay most people will just ignore it. But it only takes one crazy person to give you brain damage.”
Coming as he did from a poor migrant background, Stolevski says he anticipated the bigotry about homosexuality. He was wary of telling people about the film and its gay characters when he was filming in Skopje.
“It was interesting that migrants in Macedonia are a minority and there is no openness to their sexualities,” he says.
“I thought it would be similar with the Roma people, but once I started meeting them that was a lovely open experience. I didn’t really feel unsafe once I engaged with the situation.
“Ultimately we felt our film was very supported – and it was very supportive. So the situation was unpredictable. It was the same with racism. Like you think you’re in a safe space, which is with artsy people, but you can’t vent about the racism you witness or they’ll get defensive.”
Even in Australia, Stolevski says he still encounters homophobia and he prefers to live in a “bubble” to avoid harassment. When he was filming his queer love story Of an Age, in an outer suburb of Melbourne, he encountered abuse.
“People started calling out like, ‘faggot’ and all these other slurs at the actors, because they somehow found out we were shooting a gay movie,” he says.
“We were all like, ‘Really?’ So these things can happen everywhere and they’re very unexpected.”
Housekeeping for Beginners has its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival, which runs from October 18 to 29.
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