By Erin Free
Though he certainly hasn’t been short of praise (with major award wins at the likes of the Sundance and Sydney Film Festivals), the name of prolific and profoundly gifted writer/director Goran Stolevski should be far more recognisable considering how prolific and talented he is. Perhaps Stolevski’s knack for shooting overseas and making decidedly international-in-tone films have prevented him from being properly celebrated in his adopted home as a true Australian filmmaker. With a style and clustering of thematic concerns all his own, Goran Stolevski is indeed a truly Unsung Auteur. “I’ve always been pretty creative,” Stolevski told FilmInk in 2018. “Since I was something like five-years-old, I was writing short stories and tacky little poems. Around age twelve, I became obsessed with cinema. Then I had to make a couple of short films for high school assignments. And, well, there was no turning back.”
This desire to create led Stolevski (who arrived in Australia at the age of twelve from Macedonia) on to a host of short films, kicking off in 2007 with Ambassador, which was duly followed by Blood, Picture Of A Good Woman, Frankie’s Big Heart, Today Is Not The Day, You Deserve Everything, and Everything We Wanted. Stolevski was first truly noticed, however, with 2017’s Would You Look At Her. A provocative piece following a hard-headed tomboy who spots the unlikely solution to all her problems in an all-male religious ritual of Diving For The Cross, Stolevski’s film won the Short Film Jury Award at the coveted Sundance Film Festival. After helming a few eps of the popular TV series Nowhere Boys, Stolevski delivered another acclaimed short with My Boy Oleg. Scoring a berth at The Sydney Film Festival, the film follows a Ukrainian actress who travels to Melbourne with her toddler for a festival, and stars Alex Dimitriades and Olena Federova.
For his feature debut, Stolevski took a very different route from most Australian directors by heading to Serbia to shoot 2022’s You Won’t Be Alone, a bizarre, folkloric horror tale far different to anything created in this country. You Won’t Be Alone is set in a 19th century Macedonian village, where a young witch accidentally kills a peasant and then takes her shape. Curious about humans, she proceeds to explore what it’s like to experience life inside the bodies of others. A truly international production, the film stars Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, Romanian Anamaria Marinca (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Australian actress Alice Englert (Ratched, Top of the Lake: China Girl), Portuguese actor Carloto Cotta (Tabu) and France’s Félix Maritaud (BPM: Beats Per Minute). A strange, hypnotic and grimly authentic work, You Won’t Be Alone instantly marked Goran Stolevski as a talented Australian writer/director with a keen eye on the international market.
Stolevski followed up You Won’t Be Alone that very same year with the decidedly different Of An Age, a gritty gay love story set very much in Australia. The semi-autobiographical Of An Age takes place in 1999 Melbourne and follows an intense 24-hour romance between a 17-year-old Serbian ballroom dancer (Elias Anton) and their best friend’s (Hattie Hook) older brother (Thom Green). “I was tapping into a reality that I lived through,” Stolevski told rogerebert.com. “Not in terms of the events depicted…I’m not a dancer…I avoid dancing as much as I humanly can. The feelings about the film came from the first and only party I went to in high school. Not the event of it, but I had this very vivid flashback of what it felt like on the inside to be that age in that time and place, and what it felt like for me and what I felt love was. And how I thought love would take place, and sex and sexuality.”
More in line with his second film than his first, Stolevski’s new film Housekeeping For Beginners is about family, starting off with lovers Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), with the latter sick, and forcing the former to marry housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor), in order to adopt her two children in case she passes away. Meanwhile, Toni’s young lover Ali (Samson Selim), moves in as well, creating a heightened sense of melodrama that shows off another facet if Stolevski’s filmmaking acumen. “The stories I end up making are usually things that come from instinct,” Stolevski told FilmInk. “The ones that I decide I’m going to write about this issue or this genre and sit down and do it, come out mechanical and crappy. The only good stuff comes out of the subconscious, essentially.”
A writer/director who expertly taps his own existence to craft films of striking beauty and lyricism, the prolific and very talented Goran Stolevski deserves a lot more praise than even the considerable number of trophies on his mantelpiece might suggest.
Housekeeping For Beginners screens at The Inner West Film Fest on Sunday, April 14 at 2:00pm at Dendy Newtown. Click here for all information and to buy tickets.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
