Gay director puts Macedonia on film map

Periods of personal crisis have often yielded writing sprees for Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker who has made three critically acclaimed features in three years.

Although his recent spate of theatrical releases — all by Focus Features — could make it seem as if success has been quick to come by for the filmmaker, it has been proceeded by long seasons of debilitating professional uncertainty.

FOUR SCREENPLAYS IN NINE MONTHS

Right after turning 30, Stolevski wrote four feature screenplays in a nine-month period he spent living in Bristol, England. Writing gave shape to his days as an unemployed artist who couldn’t get any of his projects off the ground. Two of those screenplays became his recent features “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Housekeeping for Beginners.”

Then, after his 2017 short film “Would You Look at Her” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Stolevski was out of work for another two years, and wrote four more screenplays.

Stolevski, now 38, had written at least 10 scripts before making his 2022 feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone.” An evocative tale about a shape-shifting witch in a 19th-century Macedonian village, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His second effort, the 1990s-set Australian gay romance “Of an Age,” opened in U.S. cinemas in early 2023.

“I wouldn’t make every film I’ve written, but there are some I’m obsessed with; they need to exist outside of my head,” he said in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.

UNCONVENTIONAL GAY FAMILY

Out in theaters today, “Housekeeping” chronicles the chaotic everyday interactions of an unconventional gay family. Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a lesbian in Skopje, North Macedonia, marries her male best friend, a gay man, to adopt her late partner’s two daughters.

Watching the film feels like being dropped in the middle of

an unfamiliar universe that slowly begins to make sense, and while they are tonally distinct, Stolevski’s features all teem with untidy emotions, as ostracized characters assert themselves on their own terms.

After initially growing up in North Macedonia, a country in southeast Europe bordering Greece and Albania, Stolevski migrated to the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, at the age of 12. There, with access to movies on home video from the local library and a nearby cinema, he became a voracious “movie nut,” he recalled.

On top of his status as a migrant in a foreign land, Stolevski came out as gay as a teenager. Avidly watching stories centering on homosexual characters such as Pedro Almodóvar’s “Law of Desire” or Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” had slowly made him comfortable enough to accept his own sexual orientation, he said.

OUTSIDERS’ STORIES

Instinctually, he is interested in telling stories centering outsiders. Stolevski said he doesn’t feel at home anymore when he visits North Macedonia. There, he’s now considered a “rich girl,” he joked, despite having grown up in a densely populated and economically disadvantaged neighborhood. While Melbourne is a much more multicultural society, and accepting of gay people, Stolevski never felt connected to its laid-back culture and the country’s vast empty spaces.

“Being an outsider is really useful to being an artist,” he said. “Your life forces you to think in someone else’s shoes, to think of how a mainstream person would process something.”

Increasingly, though, his films are entering the mainstream. In 2022, “You Won’t Be Alone” represented Australia at the Academy Awards in the best international film category, and last year, “Housekeeping” was the Oscar entry from North Macedonia.

“I was Miss Australia and then Miss Macedonia at the Oscars,” he said, laughing.

That Focus became such a supportive partner for his idiosyncratic art house films, two of them not in English, seemed unusual. “It’s been a miracle!” Stolevski said. “You don’t expect these films to have much of a life in terms of an American cinema release much less by a reputable company.”

OUTSIDE-THE-BOX ORIGINALITY

But it was precisely the outside-the-box originality of Stolevski’s concept for “You Won’t Be Alone,” and how responsibly he took his movies’ financing, that convinced Focus working with him would be an asset rather than a risk.

“Goran makes films that are deeply humanist,” said Peter Kujawski, chair of Focus Features. “Every single time that I’ve watched the first cut for these three he’s presented us, I feel like I just learned a lot about who we are.”

“Housekeeping for Beginners,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is only the fourth Macedonian film to do so. Marija Dimitrova, the film’s producer, believes that by making movies in his homeland, Stolevski can help Macedonian cinema evolve.

According to Dimitrova, only three or four local feature films are produced in North Macedonia each year, the majority of them dramas. “It’s very important that this film is set in Macedonia,” Dimitrova said. “We don’t have many LGBTQ+ stories in films here.”

“Housekeeping” had a small release in the country last year, and will return to Macedonian cinemas following the U.S. release.

AUDIENCES REALLY HUNGRY

“I’m really happy that Macedonian audiences are really hungry for this type of cinema and for the cinema that Goran is presenting,” Dimitrova said.

For the time being, however, Stolevski wants to keep his camera away from the place of his birth and his adoptive home, to capture as-yet-unexplored horizons.

“The next three films I want to make have nothing to do with the Balkans,” he said. “None of them are set in America, Australia or England either.”

And he also needs a break from self-examination. “I want to make movies to live lives I don’t get to live otherwise, not just see myself reflected in my films,” Stolevski added.