REEES Grad Film Series – Housekeeping for Beginners (2023)

Borderlens
Queer Outlines of Geography and Gender

Housekeeping for Beginners (2023)
Directed by Goran Stolevski. North Macedonia.

Suada and Dita are a couple. Suada has two daughters, Dita doesn’t want any. They live in Dita’s house in Skopje together with numerous other people who coalesce around them to form a queer family. When Suada receives a diagnosis for a terminal disease, Dita will find herself in charge of them all. As she tries to circumvent the adoption laws in North Macedonia as well as her own skepticism, the country confronts her with the social, ethnic, and legal borders of its human geography. The “spatial” main character is Šutka, short for Šuto Orizari, a neighborhood in Skopje often considered to be the “cultural capital of the Romani people in North Macedonia,” where Dita and her family will venture.

Housekeeping for Beginners is an international co-production between North Macedonia, Croatia, Kosovo, Serbia, Poland, Australia, and the United States. It is

Goran Stolevski’s third feature film and it won the Queer Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in 2023.

Organized by Sofia Guerra
Sponsored by the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Humanities Council, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.