Goran Stolevski was scanning through his Facebook feed when he came across a family photo that warmed his heart, though it wasn’t of his own flesh and blood. A filmmaker friend from Australia in a nostalgic mood had posted a picture of when he first moved to Melbourne to live with his boyfriend in an enclave where the couple was hardly alone, surrounded in the photo by the eight lesbians they lived with with a closeness that reminded Stolevski of his own upbringing in Macedonia where his extended family might’ve felt cramped under one roof but their love was unconditional, all the more tightly knit after they made the move to Australia when he was 12.
In the three films he’s made so far, Stolevski has moved back and forth between the countries, making an astonishing debut with “You Won’t Be Alone,” where Macedonia could serve as the beguiling backdrop for a 19th century gothic thriller, that gave way to two smaller-scale but no less ambitious contemporary dramas — the Melbourne-set “Of An Age,” in which a burgeoning ballroom dancer is thrown for a loop by his partner’s brother, and “Housekeeping for Beginners,” inspired by the photo he saw from Australia in the ‘70s and decided to relocate to present-day Skopje in North Macedonia where cultural conservatism has continued to force the gay community into hiding. This would seem anything but an inconvenience with all the singing and dancing going on at the home shared by Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and her partner Suada (Alina Serban) where all are welcome, an open door policy that lets in Toni (Vladimir Tintor) and his new boyfriend Ali (Samson Selim), who seems closer in age to Suada’s kids than to his lover and able to entertain them when all others have work to attend to.
The loose arrangement works well enough for all as people come and go from Dita and Suada’s place until it looks like Suada may be leaving permanently, diagnosed with terminal cancer and Ali makes the novel suggestion that Toni make things legal with Dita to ensure custody of Suada’s children should she pass. It creates a most awkward honeymoon when what’s best for the kids puts the adults at odds when the latter takes on responsibilities they never thought they’d have while Stolevski brings the energy of the former in watching the unconventional family take shape. If his characters appear to be swept up in the whirlwind of their lives, the writer/director puts viewers in the eye of the storm, pirouetting about scenes where the camera is drawn to wherever the strongest emotion is, from the heartache they can inflict on each other to the warmth they can get from being in one another’s company.
While Stolevski seems to have established himself overnight as one of the most exciting new filmmakers in the world with his first trio of features landing in the last two years, he spent years honing his craft on screenplays that still haven’t seen the light of day, gradually building a family behind the scenes with longtime collaborators such as Marinca, the “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” who committed to star in his films well before his star was on the rise, and producers Kristina Ceyton and Samantha Jennings of Causeway Films, every bit as supportive and formidable as the one that develops in front of the camera. With the film now arriving on American shores after premiering last fall at the Venice Film Fest and subsequently picked to become Macedonia’s official entry to the Oscars, the writer/director spoke about the dividends of long-term investments, creating the conditions on set to get such lively drama and why the production had to devote part of its budget to pay a pizza place to secure the services of its lead actor.
I know this all started with a photograph for you, but how did this expand from there?
Seeing that photograph of basically what was like a gay little cocoon household in Melbourne in the 1970s [made me think] I want to stay in that space for a while and I thought a viewer would as well. I transferred it to present-day Macedonia for many reasons, partly because I wanted to document the lives that are going on right now, that otherwise would go undocumented, so [as far as history] it’ll be like we never existed and I wanted to tell a story about queer people in the present day in countries where that’s still much more complicated than we get to see in the developed West. And from there, I wanted to have a family dynamic that I realize now is the family dynamic I grew up with, which was 47 people in a household that should fit four [where] everyone’s at each other’s throats and loving each other and yelling at each other at the same time, feeling very much like they belong [in one another’s company]. And I had that idea in the back of my head for a few years until the plot took shape, and then I wrote it in 2017 during one of my many lengthy stints of unemployment, before I started making feature films and I was very happy I got to film it in the end with a wonderful cast.
Of course, Annamaria Marinca was in “You’re Not Alone,” but I understand you actually go back even further and she signed onto an early project before you had momentum. Is she someone you typically think of as an anchor?
It’s funny. Out of all those roles that I’ve written, the one that I wrote years ago, I think I maybe was thinking of her, but the two that I ended up working with her on were written in Macedonian, which is not a language she speaks. So I think of her energy, because firstly, as a performer, I think she’s in a class of her own, but also instinctively, I just feel [she’s] an emotional avatar of my feelings, and how I see the world, and how I approach it. There’s some things she does where I feel emotionally seen and I always know that if I need to have my feelings transposed into a movie, she’s the best kind of vessel for that, for lack of a better term. She builds on my ideas and gives them a reality. Also just as a fellow filmmaker, because really an actor is a fellow auteur on set, I feel like I’m in safe hands. I have a support system that comes from that and [Annamaria] learned all the dialogue phonetically for both of my features, which [is such] an amazing gift from a friend and a great artist.
On top of that, I just felt like she had my back on set all the time and it was a really beautiful shoot. It was warm and loving and very energetic, but logistically, it was very complicated and for it to become a beautiful experience, a lot of people, including Annamaria, and her co-stars Alina and Vladimir had to be my fellow nurturers on set and they really took on that role without even me asking, so I’m very grateful to have them in my movie and in my life.
When you’re creating that kind of set where everybody can speak over one another and has freedom of movement, what’s it like to set up for that and still get what you need?
I’m going to have to use a very pretentious example, so I apologize in advance — but when Jackson Pollock did splash painting, throwing splashes of paint at a canvas, if you’ve been doing it for a while, it feels like it’s improvisatory, but it actually becomes a very controlled process. You can anticipate where those splashes are going to land. It’s a little bit of a surprise that builds on what’s there, but essentially, you know what’s coming and if you try to draw splashes by hand, the effect is not the same. With my movies, I try to create an environment [where you] throw all the ingredients in this cauldron, anticipating how they will mesh together. I also edit my own films, so I’m picking up on little things on set and I can already anticipate how I can put it all together in a way that makes sense for a viewer and that person can stay emotionally connected.
A lot of people talk about how the film feels like a documentary and if I give everyone specific blocking, directions and instructions, I think it would come through very mechanical whereas I really like this energy [where] everything feels like a found moment to me. That’s what I’m looking for – a sense of controlled chaos. It might not look like it, but 95 percent of the film’s dialogue was written. But I do encourage a lot of improvisation and that isn’t just dialogue. A lot of the time it’s a gesture or a glance when an actor is so present in the story universe, they are just living in this space and they start building on it and little emotional moments start coming through that help me delete an entire scene of dialogue from later in the film. There’s a richness that comes from that, and I’m always on the alert.
It may not be dialogue, but was there any quality to this you may not have been anticipating, but you could get really excited about?
One of the opening sequences when the two women returned from hospital and discover Ali in the house was actually one of the first days of filming, and when we were shooting that scene, it was Samson’s first day [of acting ever]. It was his first proper day on set. We did a little quick test shoot beforehand, which was the opening scene [where he’s dancing around]. But [this scene with the women] there was an element of blocking and lines had to deliver it a little bit with a sense of order, so it was a tiny bit more constricted than what we normally would shoot and he was inevitably a little bit nervous because he’s never been on set and he’s working with very experienced actresses. And there’s a point where towards the end of the sequence, his hands were shaking and they were painted with like nail polish for the scene, and Annamaria saw that. I didn’t even notice it because I was looking at their eyes, but because she’s so alive to the moment, she just looked at his hands, took them in hers, looked at his eyes, let him go and just walked off.
I got teary every time watching it and then editing it because I knew that in that moment, it was partly Samson as a performer. It was his first bit of jitters, but also, it said so much about the character interaction [because Ali is] a stranger in the house, but he becomes unthreatening because you see his humanity in that moment. He’s trying to look like he’s not scared, trying to do his best to present the persona, but his body gives him away and this person [played by Annamaria] picks up on that and she gives a hint of her humanity that she doesn’t make a big deal about it. She doesn’t say, “It’s okay, you can stay,” but through letting him just walk away, it gives him the permission to stay. That tells me something about her energy that she doesn’t like to [show] her generosity. It needs to just happen. And it tells me so much about him as well and that happened naturally. It’s one of my favorite moments in the film, and not something I wrote and then I embroidered it into the edit and into the blocking.
From what I understand, you actually went quite a ways to get Samson in the film since he wanted to do it, but he couldn’t leave his job at a pizza place. Plus, you have his daughter Dzada in the film. What was it like getting him on board?
With Dzada, there wasn’t a problem. She’s five years old. She has a lot of free time. We provided a lot of free babysitting with multiple babysitters, [and gave her the] diva princess treatment. But Samson at the time was working in a pizza store, and he always desperately wanted to be an actor. He wanted to go to drama school. But because of socioeconomic and cultural realities that face a lot of the older age population in Macedonia, [which] I think is common in a lot of places, he couldn’t. So he he had to take a day job, which for him was delivering pizzas seven days a week in the suburb in the film. So when he expressed interest [in the movie], he was like, “Okay, I also will have to do my job, which is 10 hours a day, seven days a week, but I’ll find a way to do both somehow.”
I had to explain to him that would not be good for your health [besides being] physically impossible, so we had to negotiate with his then-boss to make sure that Samson could take four weeks off for the film, so firstly we had to pay the boss to cover the fees for Samson and then also on top of that, we had to find someone for the boss to hire and train him up and pay for the salary [that other employee] and just organizing a lot of people. And because I’m very driven by documenting lives that otherwise would go undocumented and I want to know that people like me and like Samson existed and they felt a whole range of things, when you’re trying to depict communities that usually don’t get to be depicted, a lot of time you have to go into this process with a different way of making a film to what the standard is. It’s not harder, really, it’s just less usual. The reward you get from that is when someone like Samson and his daughter Dzada has fire in their eyes, or the natural charisma they bring to a character that could very easily feel very written. Honestly, I would be happy to move mountains and pizza stores, if that’s what it takes. It’s such a small effort to make for the reward you get.
Including that, there are so many ways throughout the film these characters receive a grace and dignity that they aren’t usually afforded on screen. The classical music that underscores this seems to be a big part of it. Did you immediately have that in mind as a counterbalance to these hardscrabble lives?
It was an organic process that came through in the edit, but it was a surprise to a lot of the [actors] because I love watching them discover the film. I had an idea of putting Bach pieces and a few other classical pieces played on classical guitar in my previous film [“Of An Age”], and it just didn’t really work out with the energy and accessibility of that film. But I liked the emotional texture of that happening in a working class setting that it’s usually not associated with, so it was the first thing I tried with some of the sequences [in “Housekeeping for Beginners”], partly to give them a more of a meditative edge amid the chaos because I really wanted every color of the emotional spectrum — chaos, happiness, and anger, as well as peace of mind and contemplation — and the music [could] complement what’s on screen and tease out these other emotional notes that might not come through otherwise.
Also, a lot of the time Roma people get so little exposure in film across all of Europe and they often end up being very exoticized, especially [once] the music starts. Often, the way the music the filmmaker uses as a tool just makes them even more exotic and makes their feelings and thoughts exotic rather than just human. So I wanted to connect the humanity of all of these characters, whether they’re Roma, Albanian, Macedonian, gay, queer, gay, straight, or everything in between, to give a sense of the universal, because there’s no such thing as a minority feeling. Feelings are universal. Like mine, or Samson’s, or Annamaria’s are not any less universal than straight white guys, and putting in the classical music was a way to put our feelings within that universal construct and playing them on acoustic instruments was to keep it connected to the intimacy of the household and setting.
“Housekeeping for Beginners” opens in limited release on April 5th. A full list of theaters is here.