Named one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2022, Goran Stolevski, who grew up in Macedonia and Australia, follows up last year’s stunning Melbourne-set queer romance, Of An Age, with his latest emotionally potent feature as writer, director, and editor, Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za Pocetnici). Winning both the Queer Lion at Venice and Best International Narrative Feature at NewFest, Housekeeping went on to be North Macedonia’s official submission for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
Set in contemporary Skopje, North Macedonia, the film centres on a queer household of misfits including Toni (Vladimir Tintor), his much younger hookup who won’t leave, Ali (Samson Selim), and Toni’s best friend Dita (BAFTA-winner Anamaria Marinca), a woman who never planned on motherhood, but through unexpected circumstances finds herself raising her girlfriend Suada’s (Alina Șerban) two daughters, tiny troublemaker Mia (Džada Selim) and rebellious teen Vanesa (Mia Mustafa). A battle of wills ensues as the three continue to butt heads and an unlikely family emerges, one that has to fight to stay together.
With Housekeeping for Beginners opening in select US theaters on Friday, April 5th from Focus Features, Goran Stolevski speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about his vérité approach to making the film, working with a mix of veteran and non-professional actors, including scene-stealing five-year-old Džada Selim, his determination to portray fully realized, multifaceted Roma characters, and why he adores the films of Pedro Almodóvar.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Your last film, Of An Age, opened with a captivating dance scene and with Housekeeping For Beginners there is a vibrant singalong sequence that immediately drew me into the world of the film. Why did you want to start that way?
Goran Stolevski: “The singing scene was only dropped into the screenplay a few weeks before we started shooting. It wasn’t in the original script and it wasn’t originally envisioned as the opening. It was meant to be the fourth scene. When it came to putting the film together, a lot of the cast had never been on set before, especially the three actors that are in that opening scene, Samson, Džada, and Mia. I wanted to gradually introduce them to what it feels like to be on set so that they never had to feel intimidated. So we organized a test shoot for a couple of hours a few days before the film shoot itself.”
“I wanted to choose a fun scene where there was no pressure to hit their marks or to hit specific lines or worry about anything essentially. They were just meant to be themselves, play around, get comfortable with the space, and get comfortable with the crew. It was also a chance for the crew to get comfortable with a documentary style of filming and for me to start figuring out how the hell I direct a five-year-old! The answer to that question was, you don’t, she directs you, and you should be grateful that she has deigned to be present on that day for however many minutes she’s willing to be present!”
“Doing that scene set the energy quite a lot actually. Even I didn’t realize how intense and how packed with adrenaline this film was going to be. Part of that came from the three kids on screen, especially Džada. She chose which song that they were going to perform. I gave them a choice of three, and she didn’t like the other two. That was the one that she wanted to sing today, so I was like, ‘Alright, that’s the one then!’ I’m glad though, because that was my favourite too.”
“I edited that scene overnight, partly because things were such bedlam and chaos on set. It was all very pleasant and we finished shooting early, but the whole crew was quietly like, ‘How the hell is this going to edit into a coherent movie?!’ So I edited it so that they were reassured, and they were, which was great. Then I was like, ‘Well, this could only be the opening scene. You can’t cut from something else to this. This has to be the start’. My sound recordist Zoran Maksimovic was like, ‘How are you going to maintain the energy if this is the start?’ And I was like, ‘Beats me, sir, but let’s just see what we can do!'”
I love the sense of escapism and letting our emotions out that a good singalong allows us to have.
“Yeah, it’s a very cinematic thing, performing to music, in a way that’s very raw as well. Actually, I’m writing something now that has a similar opening scene, I just realized that, but if it works, then why not?”
Your initial spark of inspiration for the film came from a photograph taken in the 1970s in Melbourne, so how did that lead to a screenplay set in present-day North Macedonia?
“Partly because what appealed to me about that photograph—which was of a group of 10 queer people living in one house in 1970s Melbourne—was this sense of sanctuary, where you create your own little world where you feel like you can have a family. That wouldn’t really work in that way in present-day Melbourne, because life is very different there for queer people now. But it does translate to present-day, not just Macedonia, but to probably 90 countries in the world right now.”
“I think that we’re kind of skewed in the West, in developed economies, to think that the story depicted in this film is like some other, distant way of being queer. But actually, this is the most basic reality for probably 90% of the queer people alive today. Most queer people in the world don’t live in Finland or the USA, or in an economically developed society, where not just your lives are protected by law, but people’s attitudes don’t compromise the way you have to live. Having that reality as a context, how do you live the best life possible? How do you find a reality for yourself where you can experience the normal, universal feelings that we all experience and focus on them? So that’s what I was driven by and by wanting to document something in the present tense because if you don’t document these stories and these lives, they’re going to disappear without a trace and we’re going be left guessing what it was like and assuming and sometimes making the worst assumptions.”
“As much as life is difficult for queer people in places where they’re discriminated against, it’s not just deadly, domestic drama everyday. A lot of it is fun and singing and craziness. The things you fight about aren’t always about the oppressive system. They’re rarely about that because the oppressive system is so all-surrounding that you don’t even have to talk about it. What you end up fighting and bickering about is just as petty as what any mother and daughter get to fight about in most houses. I wanted to watch these characters live these full lives, not limited by our concept of what we would think their lives are based on just the demographic description of them.”
We also get the intersection of queer Roma characters. It’s very rare that we even see Roma characters on screen, and especially characters who aren’t solely defined by being Roma. Could you talk a bit about that aspect of the film?
“I grew up in Macedonia and when I went to primary school in my class of 36 kids, nine were Roma, so a quarter. That wasn’t unusual, that was the normality that I grew up with. So I decided to make some of the characters Roma. Ali was probably inspired by someone I knew and I always thought of him as a Roma kid. I don’t know when Alina Șerban’s character Suada became Roma, but it happened organically. My main motivation creatively is always to document a time and a place, so it just felt logical that some of these people would be Roma because some people are in everyday life in Macedonia, especially in the bigger cities.”
“Every character needs to be as fully realized and multi-dimensional as possible. My issue with a lot of depictions of Roma people is that they’re not seen as fully human. They’re seen as either belly dancers or criminals. You’re never brought into the perspective of the character as an extension of you as a viewer, it’s always something that you’re meant to be observing. Right now, in the times we live in, there’s this impetus to be progressive, but a lot of times that happens in a way that I find extremely condescending and limiting. Even with positive intentions, you can end up reducing someone to cardboard demographics. I wanted to have characters who are allowed to be as complicated and prickly as anyone else. I don’t want idealized clichés.”
“For me, within the minorities that I belong to as a migrant in the West, the most offensive cliché isn’t the migrant criminal, it’s the noble migrant who has to have positive feelings and suffer and never show any prickliness. I’m never allowed to be unlikable as a migrant and I find that really offensive and a very limited and false representation of who I can be, what my potential is as a human being. So with the Roma characters in this story, I was looking for them to have as complete and full and layered humanity as they possibly could.”
I love the vérité style of the film, how did you go about achieving that when it came to working with your cast, who are a mix of established actors and newcomers?
“It’s a very individual relationship with every actor on every movie because they need to feel like they have someone who is paying close attention to them, rather than feeling like they are just a cog in a machine. Instinctively as a person, not just as a director, I tend to adapt myself to whoever I’m talking to. So it was different with each of them. I wouldn’t even say that it was just about who was trained and professional and who wasn’t, every personality came with different gifts and different needs.”
“I was lucky that the veteran actors in the main cast—Vladimir, Alina, and Anamaria—were sort of my co-creators and fellow nurturers. I feel like directing is really about nurturing an actor on set. The term director is a misnomer because you don’t give instructions, not unless you want them to be very mechanical on set. Generally, you’re creating a space so that the actors can connect to the story and discover the character for themselves. What I felt with Alina, Anamaria, and Vladimir, is that they were helping me to create that space for everyone around them. Even with some of the supporting actors, like Sara Klimoska, who I worked with before on my first feature You Won’t Be Alone, there was a sense of family both off-screen as well as on-screen. I think that helped quite a bit. It didn’t feel like there was pressure on anyone to be hitting their marks or their lines as written. They could breathe, both within the filmmaking process and within script as well.”
Lastly, what’s your favouite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“Pedro Almodóvar is everything. There’s an emotional intensity and a sense not only that his characters are being nurtured, but I feel that I am being nurtured as a viewer too. In terms of living filmmakers, he’s the person who has the most notes of humanity covered in his work. I find it confusing that it’s so rare to see proper humanity on screen because it’s a very easy way to connect with the viewer, but Almodóvar is one of the only filmmakers doing it and definitely the greatest master at it. I’ve been very grateful to have him in my life, purely as a viewer. I’ve never met him. I’d be terrified. I’d be such a disappointment to him! But Almodóvar is the person whose work I adore.”
By James Kleinmann
Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za Pocetnici) opens in select theaters in the US on Friday, April 5th, 2024 from Focus Features, including AMC Lincoln Square and Angelika Film Center in New York, and AMC Century City 15 and AMC The Grove 14 in Los Angeles.
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