Anyone who has lived in a sharehouse might recognise the hectic energy that defines Goran Stolevski’s third feature, Housekeeping for Beginners. Cinematographer Naum Doksevski’s handheld camera hovers so close to the actors that it seems almost to get beneath their skin; the film opens on a lounge room singalong, loud and unabashed, and barely lets up from there.

This sharehouse is located in present-day Skopje, North Macedonia. It functions, we quickly discern, as both a long-term home for presiding lesbian couple Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Sauda (Alina Șerban), along with Sauda’s daughters, and as an unofficial shelter for young queer people estranged from their families. Being gay is not illegal in North Macedonia, but same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples is illegal; homophobia is prevalent. The house, then, which Dita has inherited from her politician father, is a space intermittently threatened by outside forces, but it is also, for its inhabitants, a (mostly) joyous living place. Its staid, old-fashioned furnishings are comically at odds with the rag-tag band of outsiders assembled there; Dita’s old friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor) lives in the house, along with his new lover, Ali (Samson Selim).

But sorrow is looming in this makeshift haven. Sauda is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the prognosis is poor. Her urgent wish is for Dita to legally adopt her two biological daughters, teenage Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and five-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim), but, in order to do this, Dita will have to marry Toni. No one seems especially thrilled at the prospect, least of all the two girls, who are reluctant to view either Dita or Toni as a parent.

Dzada Selim as Mia and Anamaria Marinca as Dita (photograph by Viktor Irvin Ivanov and courtesy of Maslow)

Stolevski is adept at sketching the complex dynamics at work in this group. Sauda and her daughters are Roma, while Dita and Toni are both white. Romani people are a stigmatised minority in Europe, and Sauda, with conviction born from bitter experience, is desperate for Vanesa and Mia to evade the racism that has cruelled her own prospects. She wants her daughters to take Toni’s surname, just as she wants Dita and Toni to pose as a straight couple for the purposes of a legal adoption. Șerban, who is herself Roma, is magnetic in her role as Sauda, a woman who holds little social status yet wields considerable domestic power, and who rules the household with a fierce will and a volatile temper. Sauda, who seems incapable of being anything but herself, nevertheless demands disguise from her loved ones – in order to protect them, she thinks. But is such a form of protection worth the strain? Can the subterfuge last?

The film’s ensemble cast is uniformly strong, including tiny Dzada Selim as kindergartener Mia, raucous yet wise beyond her years. Mia forges an unaffectedly tender sibling relationship with eighteen-year-old Ali, who is also Roma: the two of them paint each other’s nails, nap together and play together. Each recognises in the other someone in need of parenting. Stolevski is skilled at directing young actors and non-actors, as he showed in his previous feature, Of An Age (2022), which was set in suburban Melbourne. The unselfconscious quality of such performers suits his own verité filmmaking style. Mia Mustafa as Vanesa, Sauda’s older daughter, convincingly portrays an adolescent mix of principled rebellion and petulant self-absorption: at one point, Vanesa calls the police on Dita for ‘kidnapping’ her, willfully endangering the whole household, including her little sister.

Beyond the house, the main recurring location of the film is Šutka, or Shutka, a majority-Romani area of Skopje where Vanesa’s maternal family still live. While viewers will soon work out that Shutka is shunned by non-Roma Macedonians, I did find it helpful to read afterwards that it is also the only Romani-governed municipality in Europe. A bit like the sharehouse, Shutka is a necessary refuge from the wider world’s discrimination. Stolevski, who was born in North Macedonia before migrating to Australia as a child, makes no concessions to foreign viewers when it comes to the minutiae of local politics, which has to be gleaned from the banter and bickering of the householders. A frequent topic of conversation is marrying for the sake of a work visa: North Macedonia remains outside the European Union, and the local unemployment rate is high. Gay people are not the only residents in Skopje who marry for convenience’s sake.

A lot happens in this film, and for all the bureaucratic traps that Dita, in particular, must navigate, many of the plot turns are muddles of the characters’ own making. The pace of events, combined with the relentlessly close-up camerawork, starts to tell; the tone at times veers close to melodrama. Dita is a grounding force. The reluctant mother could have all too easily become a villain character, but Marinca plays her with an intelligent and quietly affecting blend of grief and reserve. Left unspoken is the security of a social establishment that Dita may have previously forsaken, in order to pursue her cross-racial, cross-class romance with Sauda, and to forge this unlikely and tentatively happy family. The house itself may be hers, but the household belongs to everyone who shares in it.

Housekeeping for Beginners (Maslow Entertainment) is released nationally on 9 May 2024.