I.

It’s a bright Wednesday morning when I step onto the wrong bus on my way to Housekeeping for Beginners, but I make it just in time. Housekeeping is the new offering from Macedonian-Australian director Goran Stolevski (Of An Age [2022], You Won’t Be Alone [2022]), where bonds of connection are stretched and blurred, traversing the lines between friends and lovers and family, all sharing an apartment in a city in Macedonia. What makes a house a home? What makes a family? Wikipedia’s summary of the film describes: “A touching tale about an odd family’s battle to be together emerges when their separate wills collide.” ‘Odd’ strikes me as an interesting descriptor here. Odd, queer, abnormal—

II.

Open to tremulous song. Cut to a woman in a tank top, losing her temper—Suada (Alina Șerban) moving through the world with a chosen masculinity that serves as an immediate signifier of queer womanhood. A defiance that comes from being othered for her gender and sexuality and Roma ethnicity at once. It’s an unconventional home that Suada shares with her two young daughters—Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and Mia (Džada Selim)—and her girlfriend, the Albanian social worker Dita (Anamaria Marinca). Linger on a slender young man’s painted nails. Ali (Samson Selim), also Roma, inducted into the household via the dating site ‘Gay Romeo.’ Also in the space: Toni (Vladimir Tintor), the elder man who invited Ali to the house; Elena (Sara Klimoska), Flora (Rozafë Çelaj), and Teuta (Ajshe Useini), three young goths who have found themselves a place to stay here. An early scene around a dinner table depicts bickering spread over an underlying warmth, like gouache on paper. See now how the camera shakes, how it sequesters figures in the lower third of a 4:3 aspect ratio and pauses on their expressions—tension, humour, frustration, open joy.  

III.

The loss of Suada to cancer will uproot these lives. She dies with a longing for somebody to look after her children, and that’s when Stolevski takes his audience into the trappings of heteronormative society. Dita and Toni navigate legal and familial systems to secure legal guardianship of Vanesa and Mia; one still in mourning, the other reluctant to overturn his life. A sham lavender marriage bleeds into a montage of post-wedding celebration that is electric with joy. Slowly, like mapping veins, Housekeeping holds a mirror to multiple ways of existing in the world and the impact of class and race and gender and sexuality upon those existences. So, we get keeping house for beginners. Vanesa’s attempts to flee. A drive to the Roma village of Shutka to see Vanesa and Mia’s grandmother. Toni’s explosive frustration. The family’s induction into the world of straight people at Dita’s co-worker’s party. Dita putting on lipstick ahead of an abrupt visit from the police (and indeed her grief, concern, and vexation are delivered with particular nuance). Ali leaving, coming back. Yes, this film asks for your concentration. Yes, it’s scattered at times, especially when it falls back on Vanesa’s disaffected teen outbursts to propel the plot. Being fourteen is just like that—everything hurts, all the time. Still, we find those who care about us. People who will see us and take us in.

IV.

After the movie, I buy a takeaway mint mocha. The warmth accompanies me to the tram stop and the tram takes me to my friends and I fall into their embrace. The following week, I will close my eyes as the martyr Refaat Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ is read into the gentle wind at the end of a rally calling for the University of Melbourne to divest from weapons companies, to take a stand against genocide. I think of the dining table in Housekeeping, this motley household gathered to share company and sustenance, and once more refresh my belief that community is the beating heart that lets us bear this world.  

Housekeeping for Beginners is now showing across Australia.

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Joanne Zou is an occasional writer who lives and thinks on Wurundjeri land. Joanne is currently web editor at Sine Theta magazine and a poetry editor at Voiceworks. She likes pop music, all kinds of tea, and the idea of hope. She believes in a free Palestine in her lifetime.