You Won’t Be Alone, Goran Stolevski’s directorial debut, has an odd poetry. It’s a film of few words, but lots of heart and (literally) guts, narrated in a dreamy voiceover by its main character: a young witch named Nevena, who is transformed by slitting open her chest and gutting her another being stuffs. Isolated in a cave during her childhood, Nevena must learn how to become human through imitation. Her language is broken but impressive. “This world is a burning, breaking thing,” she repeats throughout the film. “A biting, miserable thing.” And yet her answer is reverent: “My, my, my, my.”
While preparing to write You Won’t Be Alone, Stolevski had been studying folk tales. This research eventually gave way to more historical accounts, much of which revolved around women accused of shapeshifting—and by extension, witchcraft.
“I mean, what an amazing perspective to look at humanity,” the director said in a recent interview with The Daily Beast. “I wanted something that would look at life and people as this weird other thing and look at them in a very simple way without embellishing them.”
Folk flourishes permeate this film, which begins with a vengeful, charred witch leaving her mark on a little Nevena. The baby’s mother begs the dreaded Maiden Maria to let her keep the child until she is 16. But Nevena’s childhood is anything but sweet; Her mother keeps her isolated in a cave for protection and lets her grow up wild and (mostly) alone. Until finally, as a teenager, she takes her first steps into the outside world.
Stolevski, who has long been fascinated by the study of feral children, cites Genie Wiley – discovered in California in 1970 – as his inspiration. As a reference video, he showed his actors a clip of 13-year-old Wiley emerging from her home. “The way she’s acting is devastating and beautiful and mesmerizing,” he said.
You Won’t Be Alone feels like a culmination of Stolevski’s previous work, which favors female protagonists and outside perspectives. The Australian-Macedonian director said he actually had a bit of real-life inspiration while working on this project: he and his husband were living in England during the writing phase, an experience that made him “a second in my life Migrants made life.”
“It was fascinating to me that in England I wasn’t treated as an Australian… but as some kind of dirty foreigner from Macedonia,” he said. Even within the Macedonian community, Stolevski emphasized, “Being the gay kid who reads books is very different from the straight kids.” So, yes, outsiders are a constant source of fascination.
“It was fascinating to me that in England I wasn’t treated as an Australian… but as some kind of filthy foreigner from Macedonia.”
You Won’t Be Alone reunited the director with Sara Klimoska, who starred in his 2017 short film Look at Her. Stolevski credits the Macedonian actress, who plays Nevena in her original form, as one of several “writers” on the film along with producer Kristina Ceyton, cinematographer Matthew Chuang and production designer Bethany Ryan. Klimoska was present at pretty much every stage of the production, right down to scouting locations, and she and Stolevski even committed to learning a near-dead language for the film.
“The film is in a certain dialect because I wanted to capture how people spoke in this place in the 19th century,” explained Stolevski. “Both me and [Klimoska] come from a region that is very close to her. I had to learn the dialect and somehow relate it to people I knew – my grandparents and things I knew. I had to somehow understand the rhythm of it. And then she did the same.”
Stolevski and Klimoska were the only people on set who knew the dialect, which hardly anyone can speak anymore. “We could improve on this old dialect because we studied it in such detail,” he said. Each of the actors who would take on the role of Nevena — Noomi Rapace, Carloto Cotta, and Alice Englert — received Klimoska’s voiceover recording ahead of time so they could prepare, and the actress even coached each of the new Nevenas before they began filming.
But this story isn’t just about Nevena; While she’s certainly the main character and the eyes of the audience in the film, the 200-year-old witch Old Maid Maria stands out.
“The two main characters [Nevena and Maria] I’m sort of split into two people,” Stolevski said.
While Nevena moves through the world with wide eyes and sensitivity, Old Maid Maria is filled with bitterness and gall. The exact origin of her burned skin and cynical attitude remains hidden until late in the film, but it’s clear throughout that her anger at humanity is not unjustified. Somehow their community betrayed them. No wonder, then, that she trusts no one but herself and has little patience for the sentimentality of her kidnapped daughter.
Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca plays the Old Maid Maria and performs the role in two different languages. Sometimes the witch speaks Macedonian when dealing with a person. But her true language, the language she thinks in, is Aromanian, an ancient nomadic language that is virtually extinct.
Having a performer like Marinca embody this kind of challenging role has been a thrill for Stolevski who has been a huge fan ever since he saw her in 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days. The director was enchanted by “her eyes and the worlds they contain” in this film, “and in this very simple set-up, how much she can convey while being completely still and still.” Indeed, working with the actress enhanced just Stolevski’s passion for her artistry. “I want her to be in a lot of my films,” he said, laughing.
Remarkably, as much as You Won’t Be Alone is about observing humanity as an outsider like Stolevski, the film’s reception has provided its director with the opposite experience.
“In some of the reviews I’ve read, there are some phrases that are almost literal notes that I wrote in the margins for myself that I didn’t even share with anyone on the crew,” Stolevski said. “It’s really moving to see because the film is so much about connections and how difficult it is to keep them alive.”
It’s a realization we should all keep in mind for those who constantly feel out of place: In fact, we’re never truly alone in this experience.