Housekeeping For Beginners Proves Chosen Family Provides Love in Abundance

Ever heard people make remarks about the family they are born into and family that is chosen from a group of friends or peers. Director Goran Stolevski bring audiences a story that literally came from an old photograph posted on Facebook by a friend exploring the universal truths of family, both the ones we’re born into and the ones we find for ourselves.

Dita (Anamaria Marinca) is a middle-aged gay woman employed as a social worker with a sprawling villa which has become a sanctuary for queer people, including her partner Suada (Alina Serban), Suada’s daughters Mia (Dzada Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), as well as,  Dita’s old friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor) and his younger lover Ali (Samson Selim).Over the past 20 years, she has taken in social exiles, most of them gay and in the case of Suada, also Roma, which remains the country’s poorest and most maligned minority. Being queer in North Macedonia today, Stolevski says, is complicated. “There are no laws against same-sex relationships, but there is also no gay marriage and no gay adoption. You just don’t see openly gay people in public life, except for activists,” he explains. “Random violent assaults are not unusual.”

In this film’s beginning scene, audiences sense that Suada is faced with a moral dilemma given her prognosis of terminal pancreatic cancer and she begs Dita to take care of her kids.  There is nothing more heartbreaking than watching a mother separate herself from loved ones in hopes of providing better life in her absence.

Housekeeping for Beginners has a intensely complicated narrative.  Not only are we dealing with the aforementioned issues, but at some point the narrative of child trafficking is introduced when Vanesa decides she can no longer deal with Dita and the life left behind from her mother’s untimely death.  Ali struggles living a double life and not being able to ascertain which life leads him into his authentic self. Not to mention Dita trying to keep everything and everyone in check as the primary breadwinner of the household – all while they all grieve in their individual ways.

The cast is outstanding from the youngest (Dzada Selim) to the oldest (Marinca).  While one can see traces of  Suada’s brutal honesty in Mia, it is Vanesa who has inhabited her mother’s spirited fiery personality and temper.  Mustafa is the standout exuding a range well beyond her years, shortly followed by Samson Selim. As Ali, Selim is the one character who straddles the emotionality of this film from every given angle with a beautiful angst and fragility that resonates to the core.

Being someone who identifies as ‘othered’ simply based on my skin tone and gender, Housekeeping for Beginners really struck a nerve and a chord that sends chills down my spine, yet fills me elated content that somewhere in the world human being will one day be only that one thing – human.