This breakthrough Australian director is back with a safe house for misfits

Goran Stolevski has lived in Australia – firstly in Melbourne, now in Sydney – since he was 12, but he says he has never felt at home there. His childhood was spent in Macedonia. As a teenager in the ’90s, he likes to say now, his best friends were Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. He didn’t feel any more at home in Macedonia on regular family trips back to Skopje – and even less so now.

“As a queer person here, it’s not a fun thing,” he told me on a Zoom call when he was shooting his new film, Housekeeping for Beginners. “I definitely have to censor myself, so it’s not home in that way. And the Macedonia I grew up in doesn’t exist any more. I don’t say that as a bad thing. It’s kind of like an interesting adventure. At the same time I’m making movies, I find myself living in places I never would, normally. So it feels like I’m travelling, being here. It’s just convenient I speak the language.”

Stolevski has always said his films are not autobiographical – even Of An Age, his 2022 drama about gay teenagers set in an outer suburb of Melbourne, draws on aspects of his growing up “but the events are entirely fictional”. But that longstanding sense of being an outsider permeates Housekeeping for Beginners. It is set in a once stately house that the middle-aged owner Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and her Roma partner Sauda (Alina Serban) have allowed to become a safe house for a motley crew of other social pariahs.

Dita’s moody gay friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor) has just asked his much younger, obviously unsuitable Roma boyfriend Ali (Samson Selim) to move in. The traditionally nomadic Roma people are treated with open contempt by other Macedonians, says Stolevski.

“I would witness racism, then hear my actors tell me stories of everyday life, not even as experiences of racism but just normality for them.” Three young lesbians who have been thrown out of various homes have also moved in. Then there are Sauda’s children: a snappy adolescent girl Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and little Mia (Dzada Selim), who is just five but holds her own among these scrapping, posturing, edgy folk.

It isn’t exactly a functioning family; there is a good deal of shouting under a perpetual pall of smoke. When you’re on your guard in the outside world, says Stolevski, there is a constant tension.

He felt it, too: within a couple of weeks of working in Skopje, his own awareness that he must never touch his partner in public was so firmly inscribed on his muscle memory that he didn’t reach out to him even when he walked in front of a car. He could have been killed, with Stolevski having done no more than tell him, too late, to stop. “And then it’s like this anger collects in you, and you need to vent, but there isn’t anywhere safe to do it.”

His characters are bonded by that need for a safe space. “Even as they’re fighting, they feel safe. Even if they hit each other. This violence is not as affecting on a primal level as it would be outside.” It is only a provisional safety, however. Sauda is dying of cancer, which has focused her mind in alarming ways. “Swear to look after the children,” she shouts at Dita, holding a knife over her own arm. Dita swears against her will; she has no interest in motherhood and the girls do not want her.

But when Vanesa calls the police in a fit of teenage pique, telling them she has been captured by a gay cult, Dita turns into a maternal avenger. This is all the authorities need to confiscate the children, the house and Dita’s job. Get rid of anything that looks gay, she shouts. Stuff goes into cupboards. The police duly arrive to find Dita in a frock sitting on a couch with Toni, the consummate married couple. Funny though it is, it is in this moment that we see these people are living in fear.

In fact, Stolevski did not set out to tell a story about Macedonia. The idea of making a film about a queer household was sparked by a photograph of a similarly sprawling Melbourne household of the ’70s that was posted on social media by Australian filmmaker Tony Ayres. “It was just a casual photo from one day in their lives and Tony and his boyfriend – who is still his boyfriend – where they were living with eight women. I loved that energy and that space, but the decision to set it in Macedonia came pretty quickly after that.”

It is the second feature he has made there; the first was an extraordinary story of witches stealing children called You Won’t Be Alone (2022). He has never wanted to be defined or confined by his ethnicity but, he says, this hothouse of the oppressed would not make sense set in contemporary Melbourne; the prevailing boots-and-all homophobia wouldn’t ring true.

“It was really the idea of a cocoon that I responded to, so I wanted to set it in Macedonia where that space still means something very different from what it would in Australia now.

“Also that sense of home. You know, I grew up in a tiny apartment with multiple generations of people and cousins coming in and out at all times. The multiple generations were the crux of it.” The same scenario would work in Poland or Romania, he adds. “But, as a Macedonian, I could get financing in Macedonia.”

Most of the characters are played by non-actors who were launched into their roles without rehearsal, encouraged to bring their own experiences to the process.

“I often encourage people to improvise because I know they’ll end up saying exactly what’s written in the script much more evocatively,” says Stolevski. “Because they’re trying to come up with the next thing to say based on what they’re feeling, but they’re working it out for themselves.”

They also move where they want as Naum Doksevski’s camera follows them, homing in on their faces. Stolevski ramps up that intimacy further by using the squarish Academy ratio, which means a face in close-up will fill the screen. “For me, a story starts in the eyes, not the decor,” says Stolevski. The tightness of focus also forces the camera to keep pace with the actors, adding to the sense of urgency. “I wanted a hectic energy ... to follow the action you have to move faster and further, so there is an innate dynamism to it.”

His novice actors were not bothered; on the contrary, the camera was intrinsic to their new lives in this grand but shabby house, where very little housekeeping actually gets done. “Knowing the camera is following them, they will direct themselves,” says Stolevski. “In this space – which was a real house – it’s like they’re having a real day-to-day life and they’re not really self-conscious ... I’m not even the director of this film. The film is directing all of us.”

Housekeeping for Beginners is in cinemas from May 9.