Stolevski, Goran

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    Making Films About Outsiders, Increasingly in the Mainstream

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    Goran Stolevski, who is from North Macedonia and grew up partly in Australia, has made three features in three years, all teeming with unruly emotion.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.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 sophomore 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 a video call in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Housekeeping for Beginners’ Review: Daddy Nearest

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      Sad news forces a diverse group of friends to take unorthodox action in this volatile, affecting drama.For his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” the writer and director Goran Stolevski returns to his birthplace, North Macedonia, to capture the tumbling energy and volatile emotions of a household in crisis.The home, a haven of sorts for racial and cultural outsiders, belongs to Dita (Anamaria Marinca), a middle-age social worker whose partner, Suada (Alina Serban), has received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. While Dita anxiously seeks treatment options, the more abrasive Suada accuses her doctor of ill-treating patients who, like her, belong to the maligned ethnic group known as Roma. Suada fears for the future of her daughters: Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), an astringent teenager, and little Mia (a ridiculously charming Dzada Selim). Desperate to give them a better life, she begs Dita to adopt the girls and fraudulently register them as white. And as lesbians are not permitted to adopt, Dita will have to marry a man.This setup might sound depressing or even farcical, but “Housekeeping” is deeply sincere and occasionally joyous. As Dita and a gay housemate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), reluctantly plan a Potemkin wedding, Naum Doksevski’s supple, hand-held camera swerves and dodges around raucous dance parties and rowdy arguments, visually mapping the residents’ tangled fates and churning feelings. A furiously grieving Vanesa rebels by seeking out her Roma grandmother. And playful Ali (a terrific screen debut by Samson Selim), Toni’s latest hookup, entertains Mia and mediates quarrels. Intimate, partly improvised conversations affirm the group’s rough affections and peppery personalities.This stylistic pliancy is a far cry from Stolevski’s beautifully controlled feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone” (2022), yet both share an interest in difference and the restrictions of approved gender roles. In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.Housekeeping for BeginnersRated R for bad language and good vibes. In Macedonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Of an Age’ Review: A Boy’s Own (Coming Out) Story

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      In 1999 Melbourne, a teenage outsider meets a young man who’s smart, kind, sensitive and looks mighty fine in a tight black T-shirt.One of the trickier hurdles that romantic movies need to clear is convincing the viewer to swoon, too. That bar proves insurmountably high in “Of an Age,” a confident if unpersuasive story about a quintessentially alienated teenager falling for guy in his mid-20s who checks all the heartthrob boxes: He’s kind, good looking, has a nice smile and seems to like the attention directed at him. Yet why this object of desire, an ostensibly serious thinker en route to grad school, would fall for our charisma-challenged protagonist remains thoroughly mystifying.The writer-director Goran Stolevski made a modest splash at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with his feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone,” a silly witchy-woman horror movie set in 19th-century Macedonia that effectively flicks at your nerves without taxing your brain. For his new movie, Stolevski has shifted focus and swapped genres to create a low-key, intimate portrait of a young man’s awakening — sexual and otherwise — in Melbourne. It’s the summer of 1999 when Kol (Elias Anton), a Serbian immigrant a few weeks shy of 18, encounters Adam (a fine Thom Green), who over the course of a day upends the teen’s life.Overlong story short, they meet strainingly cute through Adam’s sister Ebony (Hattie Hook), who’s Kol’s dance partner and only apparent friend, though mostly just an off-putting script contrivance. Her role is to get the guys together, which she does in a protracted opener that settles down with Adam behind the wheel and Kol riding jumpy shotgun. They talk and talk. Adam not-so-casually shares that he’s gay and single, news that Kol receives with transparent anxiety and obvious interest. Later, they attend a party where a couple of girls are mean to Kol, who’s rescued by Adam. The guys hit the road again, and talk and talk some more.Stolevski, as his earlier work shows, knows his way around a camera. Working with the cinematographer Matthew Chuang (who also shot “You Won’t Be Alone”), Stolevski uses the physical confines of the car with intelligence, shrewdly marshaling its tight space to create a sense of claustrophobia that subtly shifts into intimacy as the men warm to each other. He also does nice work with the Australian light, in some sequences giving the visuals a blurry radiance that softens every hard edge, turns an ordinary cityscape into a jewel box and looks particularly lovely when bounced off Adam’s bare skin.It’s too bad then that, for all the bashful and gawking looks he employs playing Kol, Anton just doesn’t cut it as a timid, socially awkward adolescent outsider, a serious impediment to the movie’s fragile realism. The actor makes more sense in the role when the story jumps forward in time, bringing a now-strappingly adult Kol with it. The movie’s greater, intractable problem, though, is that Stolevski has burdened his characters with such obvious narrative instrumentality — Kol is the sensitive naïf while Adam is the appealing, gentle exemplar of an authentic life — that the two simply never come to life as people, either as individuals or as a couple. They say and do everything that they should, and also everything that you expect.Of an AgeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘You Won’t Be Alone’ Review: Season of the Witch

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      A supernaturally altered young woman learns how to be human in this mesmerizing folk-horror tale.“You Won’t Be Alone,” the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.Set in a mountain village in 19th-century Macedonia and drawing on regional folklore, Stolevski’s supremely confident script centers on Nevena (Sara Klimoska), an innocent young woman driven by an intense curiosity. To protect her from an ancient witch (Anamaria Marinca) who lusts after the blood of newborns, Nevena’s mother had hidden her in a cave from birth until her 16th birthday. When the witch returns on that date and abducts Nevena — having rendered her mute in infancy — the young woman embarks on an astonishing, shape-shifting journey of death and discovery.Unwaveringly committed to its singular vision, and softened by Matthew Chuang’s lushly seductive images, “You Won’t Be Alone” ponders more than one existential question. How should we understand human nature when we’ve never been nurtured? Soft scraps of narration, poetic and wonder-filled, allow us to glimpse Nevena’s thoughts as she accidentally kills a village woman (Noomi Rapace), opens her own chest cavity and stuffs the woman’s bloody organs inside. Assuming the woman’s shape, Nevena will go on to inhabit a series of villagers, mirroring behaviors and soaking up experiences.Along the way, this strange, deeply humane movie becomes a beguiling meditation on identity and gender, underscoring the precarity of women in a society ruled by men. Within its mystical borders, tenderness and savagery walk side by side, and a palm stretched out in friendship may conceal a witch’s claw.You Won’t Be AloneRated R for sexual assault and a satisfying revenge. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More