Today, my guest is writer-director Goran Stolevski.
I first got to know of Goran and his work in 2023 through his second feature, Of An Age. A tender, poignant, deeply compassionate portrait of the pains of growing up, it focuses on a closeted 18-year-old in Melbourne, Australia, who over the course of one night meets and connects with the older brother of his high-school best friend.
I was really struck by the film, and invited Goran to write a personal essay for Talkhouse. Houses I Lived In, the resulting piece that he wrote, is about his teenage years as a newly arrived Macedonian immigrant in Australia, and the resilience he developed at that time, which carried him through to finally becoming a filmmaker.
The following year, I saw Stolevski’s next feature, Housekeeping for Beginners, a profoundly sad but also vibrant and funny film about the occupants of a kind of informal halfway house for queer youth in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, and the challenges they face when one of the two women who own the house dies.
After being wowed by that movie, I went back to watch Stolevski’s debut feature, You Won’t Be Alone. A Balkan-set 19th century folk tale about a young girl taken by a “Wolf-Eateress,” or witch, it follows her as she assumes different forms, searching for her place in the world. The film is visually stunning, compellingly told and feels simultaneously old-fashioned and decidedly modern.
Stolevski’s three features are each very distinct in style, narrative, feel, sense of place, etc., but there’s a remarkable humanity and emotional intelligence that connects them as they play with such shared themes as rupture, chosen family, the search for home, and pursuit of self-identity. I struggle to think of any filmmaker in recent memory who’s come out the gate like this with three beautifully crafted films in a row, with a voice that feels so specific and developed.
I really enjoyed interacting with Stolevski when he wrote for Talkhouse, and he’s someone who tells it like it is, so he was an obvious choice as a guest for this season of Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That. Plus, I knew that talking with him would give me a window into the complex human being that he is!
Over the course of a strikingly frank conversation, he talked about why writing a shitty script is a quicker road to filmmaking success, why he won’t be making Monopoly: The Movie, his revisionist take on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the skinny on his sex robot movie,why the apocalypse will not feature anyone who looks like Pedro Pascal, why he wishes he didn’t want to make movies … and much, much more.
You Won’t Be Alone, Of An Age and Housekeeping for Beginners are all available to stream. Watch them, luxuriate in them, tell your friends about them. They are special films.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is comedian turned writer-director John Early ...
