"My best friend growing up was Katharine Hepburn," says Goran Stolevski. The filmmaker was born in Macedonia but emigrated to Australia at the age of 12, which is when he started frequenting the cinema. "Around the same time, the Oscars were on, and there was this montage of all these Best Picture winners over the years," he remembers. "And if you give me numbers and years and art, there is a part of my brain that gets activated. So, I started being very obsessed with film history and tracking down all these films."
"Whenever I was borrowing videos, I was pretending it was for my parents, because it was too embarrassing for a 13-year-old to ask for Katharine Hepburn or Battleship Potemkin," he recalls with a laugh. "Imagine being on the outer suburbs of a factory suburb and asking for these films! 'It's for my mom' was my answer. My mom is lovely, but she never really watched those films. I don't have an explanation as to where it comes from, but I used to be more into books and then shifted to movies around age 12. And it's been a curse ever since."
Stolevski graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne with a Masters in Film and Television. After making some 25 short films, he marked his feature directorial debut with 2022's You Won't Be Alone, a 19th-century folk story about a shape-shifting witch. He followed it with 2023's Of an Age, a wistful coming-of-age story about a queer teen living in the suburbs of Australia. His latest — his third feature in three years — is Housekeeping for Beginners, a found family drama that won the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
"Being a failed filmmaker for 20 years before you get your first shot, just to survive on a day-to-day level, I had to bury all my anxieties and fears for my future into a story world that eventually grew into a screenplay, and then that screenplay would inevitably get rejected or not read by anyone. And then to absorb that rejection and anxiety, I would move on to a whole other story and write that," Stolevski says of his prolific output.
The writer, director and editor explains, "I had written 13 features before I made my first one. So, when I suddenly became a temporary hot property and people asked me, 'Do you have a feature?' I was like, 'Here's one, and here's another one, and here's another one. Let's go!' That's my advice: Bury your anxieties in your writing."
Below, Stolevski shares with A.frame five of his favorite films.
Directed by: George Cukor | Written by: Donald Ogden Stewart
My best friend growing up was Katharine Hepburn, so I'd like to start with her, if I may. Which one shall we do? Let's go with The Philadelphia Story, because I feel like no one talks about that film, and it's the greatest screenplay ever written. I actually grew up watching a lot of screwball comedies from the '30s and '40s, which instilled in me the sense of what great dialogue really means. I really miss it, because I feel like there hasn't been great dialogue for 50 years, and that film is the perfect example of great dialogue on top of it being a romantic comedy. It's one of the few times where you genuinely don't know which person the main character is going to end up with, and I now appreciate what craft and skill it takes to build that kind of story.
Also, the thing I love a lot about all those older romantic comedies is that I actually believe those people have had sex in real life, whereas contemporary rom-coms, no matter how graphic they are, I'm not convinced any one of the characters on the screen has actually either had or enjoyed sex, to be honest. I wish we were more grown-up about it, to be honest. But that is never a problem I had with Katharine Hepburn's films.
Written and Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Speaking of sex, which I tend to way too much in public, I'll go with Law of Desire. I feel like I never talk about Almodóvar as much as I should, because he was very significant to my life. The poster for Law of Desire is in Adam's bedroom in Of an Age for a reason. For a character discovering their gayness in the suburbs of Melbourne in the '90s, Almodóvar is usually the way you discovered it — and specifically 1980s Antonio Banderas. Even if you were not gay before it, you will be at the end if you're a man. I think even if you're a woman watching that film, by the end of it, you're a male homosexual.
It is also very well-written and crafted, but there's a very basic reason why you're like, wow! Also, to be exposed to this kind of story where everything is game, which I think is a tradition of storytelling in which Almodóvar continues to this day and which he deepens every decade. I think he's the greatest artist alive right now, and I don't even think that's my favorite of his films. It's hard to say what is. I have like, eight! But I'll go with Law of Desire, because it was very important to me for very simple reasons at a young age.
Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin | Written by: Roger Bohbot and Arnaud Desplechin
I should go for something older, because I feel like most of the greatest films ever made were made before 2004 and no one seems to speak about them anymore. But I will talk about film from 2004. Kings and Queen is a French film which, again, I saw at a particular age. I was 18 and just starting as a filmmaker, and I had already seen thousands of films before this point; I was a film nerd that was sated, that felt like, "Oh, I've seen everything. I've seen every rule broken."
But the way Kings and Queen was put together, it felt like cinema without barriers and like cinema reinvented in this person's image. Literature is very important to me as well, but I love how that film feels like a novel in many ways — in the detail of the characters' personalities and the relationships and the depth and the layers — but it's so cinematic. You could not put a book together that way. You could not adapt that from a novel. It's specific to cinema and its rhythms and what it gives you.
And again, it's a film I don't hear about much anymore, because it had the misfortune of having subtitles in most of the world. Right now, I get the impression that the only way for feelings to be significant is for an Anglo-Saxon celebrity to pronounce them on-screen. Otherwise, it's never deep for some reason. But that film is one of the deepest I've seen in my life. It's also very playful and very comedic, and it allows for extreme darkness and tragedy in between comedy and fun. It also features one of the greatest actresses alive, Emmanuelle Devos, who still hasn't got her due, as far as I'm concerned.
Written and Directed by: Kenneth Lonergan
I saw Margaret eight years into my relationship with my then-boyfriend and now husband, and it was the first time he'd seen me cry. And when I say cry, I mean uncontrollably. I don't even know why, but as soon as the credits started, suddenly the tears were streaming. Physiologically, I had no control over them, and it went on for an embarrassing 20 minutes. The lights came on, and it was just very public all of a sudden. Like "Why the f**k did you turn the lights on straight away?" And I still remember the face my husband gave me. It was not even concern; it was just like, "What is going on?!"
But I actually don't feel like I've connected to a character as much as I have to Anna Paquin's in Margaret. What I love about that film is that it feels like life. Untethered, on its own terms, and it feels real. Growing up is realizing that you genuinely have no control over anything, and there's no one looking out for you, and that you're not really the center of the universe in the way that you built yourself as, and there is just something profoundly moving about that film. I think Kenneth Lonergan is one of the greatest writers of all time. And what a journey for that film. It was made and then suppressed for six years after it was shot and then dumped in obscurity. But a bunch of people who really love movies made sure it was seen as much as possible. So, Margaret is probably still my favorite film of this century.
Written and Directed by: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Shoplifters was the second time I cried in public. And what's funny is, when I first spoke with the production designer of Housekeeping, she mentioned Shoplifters as a reference, and I was like, "Oh, yes. Slay." It hadn't even occurred to me, because I wrote this film in, like, 2017, so it was before Shoplifters was released. Then, when we were putting together the visual style for it, for some reason, I never thought of Shoplifters as a reference. But I think emotionally, even though it was released after I wrote Housekeeping, it still felt like it comes from the same place that the film that I wrote comes from.
It's a film that throws you into this situation before you realize what the relationship between these characters is, and it's a very specific relationship. That's so rare in films, and I so appreciate being put in this situation where I know something is going on that is emotionally important, but I'm just getting to enjoy spending time with these people and then gradually putting things together. I think that is the language of cinema and what separates it from TV. So, I love that film for that reason and also for the way it's novelistic in its detail of who these people are in their relationships, but it could never be a book. It's a piece of cinema.
