'Housekeeping for Beginners' captures the raw beauty of queer 'found family'
Goran Stolevski's newest film, "Housekeeping for Beginners," is a heartbreaking and hopeful tale about a group of cohabiting outcasts in North Macedonia as they attempt to recover from the loss of their matriarch.
The Macedonian-born filmmaker Goran Stolevski, whose previous features include 2022’s “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Of an Age,” has a talent for making heartbreaking films that contain just enough tragedy to turn a person inside out. His third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” which follows a mostly queer “found family” of eight as it attempts to recover from the loss of the woman at the center of their world, certainly fits that bill.
Featuring a multigenerational cast of Eastern European actors, the ensemble film, which will be released in select theaters on Friday, was inspired by a photo from the 1970s taken by one of Stolevski’s friends just after he had moved to Melbourne, Australia, and into a house with his boyfriend and eight gay women.
“He posted this random snapshot from their day-to-day life, and I just remember looking at it and going, like, what a great space — a little cocoon where you can be relaxed and live your messy life on your own terms, in a time and place where that wasn’t possible for most queer people,” Stolevski told NBC News in an interview.
From left, Samson Selim as Ali, Vladimir Tintor as Toni, Anamaria Marinca as Dita and Sara Klimoska as Elena in "Housekeeping for Beginners."Viktor Irvin Ivanov / Focus FeaturesStolevski then thought about transposing what he saw in that decades-old photo into a present-day context in North Macedonia, in southeast Europe just north of Greece.
“Macedonia is where I grew up, so it just felt natural, and also, Macedonia is a great stand-in for pretty much all of Eastern Europe and southern Europe,” the director, who moved to Australia as a teenager, said. “From a Western, Anglo-Saxon perspective, it’s this kind of exotic place, but, in reality, most queer lives in most countries today are shaped by a much more similar reality to what Macedonians are dealing with than to what we are.”
Rating: 5