Housekeeping for Beginners — Goran Stolevski

Although Goran Stolevski’s third film only features one gay sex scene and next to no same-sex romantic intimacy, Housekeeping for Beginners has a claim as one of the queerest films of the 2020s so far. That his first two films, You Won’t Be Alone and Of An Age, came out just two short years ago hasn’t prevented the Macedonian-Australian director from becoming a well-regarded name on the festival circuit and with the kind of film lovers in possession of a Kanopy account. Those films, too, were pretty queer, but in his latest film, the subversive queer capacity, and necessity, to reimagine and reinvent the family, rather than the more usual transactional superficial representation or sex itself, breathes a queer life into the text.

Inspired by a photograph of his openly gay filmmaker friend Tony Ayres from the 1980s, Stolevski’s Queer Lion winner at the 80th Venice International Film Festival begins from the perspective of Ali (Samson Selim), the only new fish to the queer haven and safehouse of Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and her devoted Roma girlfriend Suada (Alina Șerban). The venery of the other adult in the house, Toni (Vladimir Tintor), is what brings the 19-year-old Ali, also a Roma, to the affectionately homemade queer sanctuary. A cadre of queer teen outcasts fills most of the space in the cluttered home. Only Suada’s two daughters — the fire-starter Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and the full-of-life pre-teen Mia (Džada Selim) — do not conform to identifiable queer typologies. Mia’s too young to be into anyone, while Vanesa concocts a plan to run away with a boy after tragedy strikes the home in the form of pancreatic cancer. Though they are not queer, they are emphatically part of the house — integrally so. Their presence is never questioned, their way of existing never alienated.

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