‘Housekeeping For Beginners’ Offers A Bittersweet Look At A ‘Found Family’ In Crisis

Goran Stolevski drew from his own post-adolescent experiences in his acclaimed 2022 film “Of an Age,” which offered a steamy, willfully messy look at two young gay men experiencing their first love.

The Macedonian-born, Australian-raised writer and director’s latest cinematic offering, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” is a bittersweet take on a different aspect of the LGBTQ+ experience, inspired ― in part ― by a decades-old photo shared by a friend.

“He posted a snapshot online of a time in his youth when he first moved to Melbourne in the 1970s,” Stolevski told HuffPost. “He moved in with his boyfriend and eight gay women. I saw, in this space, all these queer people in a time and place where it was a bit more complicated to be [LGBTQ+]. And I loved that sense of cocoon, of being able to live your life in a relaxed way when you normally couldn’t do that. And I thought, ‘That’s a great setting for a story.’”

“Housekeeping for Beginners,” released in theaters Friday, follows Dita (played by Romanian actor Anamaria Marinca), a queer, middle-aged social worker whose eight-person household has become a safe haven for young LGBTQ+ people in North Macedonia. Her live-in girlfriend is Suada (Alina Serban), a Roma woman and mother of two daughters: 5-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafa), a wry and disaffected teen.

After Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she begs the seemingly nonmaternal Dita to adopt her girls. To carry out her girlfriend’s wishes, Dita reluctantly attempts to coerce one of her gay housemates, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), to marry her so that the two can pose as a heterosexual couple.

To U.S. audiences, such an arrangement may seem cribbed from “The Birdcage” and other comedies of the past. In North Macedonia, however, it’s not especially far-fetched, as LGBTQ+ people still face rampant discrimination and same-sex marriage remains illegal.

Together, Dita and Toni attempt to navigate the country’s legal system to keep their “found family” together, but challenges ― including Vanesa growing increasingly rebellious as she grieves the loss of her mother ― threaten to pull their household apart at any minute.

Like “Of an Age,” Stolevski initially envisioned “Housekeeping for Beginners” as taking place in Australia, where he’s spent most of his adult life. However, his interest in avoiding a period film prompted him to shift the story to his birthplace, which he described as “a good stand-in for pretty much all of Eastern and Southern Europe.”

“I lived in a two-bedroom flat with three different generations and six different people,” he said. “That’s the kind of crowded, communal energy that shapes a lot of lives in most of the world, outside of the economically developed West. And I kind of miss that energy.”

He went on to note: “Queerness can be very different based on where [you are from], and I’m very drawn to those specificities. I like the sense of documenting a time and place, and what it feels like for a particular person in that time and place.”

To keep “Housekeeping for Beginners” rooted in authenticity, Stolevski encouraged his experienced cast members to improvise, and brought in a number of first-time screen actors for principal roles. Among them is Samson Selim — the real-life father of Dzada Selim — who plays Ali, one of Toni’s much-younger hookups.

“There was a real sense of family off-screen as well as on-screen,” Stolevski said. “The film itself is kind of in charge. I’m just there to foster it a bit.”

Early reviews of “Housekeeping for Beginners” have been overwhelmingly positive, with the Los Angeles Times calling it a “riveting domestic drama.”

If it succeeds, the film could well establish Stolevski alongside Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) and Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers”) as one of modern queer cinema’s foremost auteurs. Though he’s tight-lipped on specifics, one of his forthcoming projects examines LGBTQ+ life in India and Korea.

“Essentially, I want my movies to exist 50 years after I do. I’m always drawn to outsider characters, for lack of a better term,” he said. “[But] I get a little bit annoyed with how being queer means you’re kind of niche. I think my feelings are just as universal as everyone else’s, and I don’t want to dilute the queerness.”

Watch the trailer for “Housekeeping for Beginners” below.