Goran Stolevski Needed Twenty Years to Become an Overnight Success

variety.com:

Katherine Tulich Writer and director Goran Stolevski has had a whirlwind two years. He recently returned to Australia after shooting his third film, “Housekeeping for Beginners” in Skopje, North Macedonia to attend the world premier of his second film “Of An Age.” That took him to the Melbourne International Film Festival and before traveling on to Western Australia for CinefestOz where the film won the festival’s only recurring award, and one of the industry’s richest, worth A$100,000 (or $65,000).

The Macedonian-born, Melbourne-raised film maker broke onto the international stage earlier this year with his feature debut “You Won’t Be Alone”, a supernatural folk-horror tale about a girl who becomes a shape-shifter in a 19th century Macedonian village.

The film won critical acclaim at Sundance and received a limited theatrical release in the U.S. through Focus Features, which also holds worldwide distribution rights.

For all that, Stolevski is no overnight sensation. He has spent the past twenty years writing scripts and making 25 short films (“Would You Look At Her” won the jury prize for a short film at Sundance in 2018). “By the time anyone took notice, I had written 13 features before I had even directed my first one,” said Stolevski speaking with Variety at CinefestOz. “Of An Age” is set in Melbourne in the summer of 1999 and follows the intense gay romance of a Serbian-Australian ballroom dancer, Nikola “Kol” (Elias Anton) and his dance partner’s brother, Adam (Thom Green).