Sandra Hüller and Colman Domingo are attached to Goran Stolevski’s fourth feature True-ish, which will be shopped at the Cannes Film Market next month.
Variety broke the news of the casting of the Oscar-nominated actors over the Easter break. Kristina Ceyton and Samantha Jennings of Causeway Films, who have worked with the Macedonian-Australian director on all of his projects, will produce.
Charades and New Europe Film Sales have taken international rights to the satirical drama, while UTA Independent Film Group has the North American rights.
Due to shoot in Eastern Europe next year, True-ish will mark the fourth feature from Stolevski in as many years. His debut feature You Won’t Be Alone premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and was quickly followed by the Melbourne-set Of An Age. His third film, Housekeeping for Beginners, produced in Macedonia, premiered in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti (Horizons) competition in 2023. You Won’t Be Alone was Australia’s submission for the 2023 international feature film Oscar, while Housekeeping for Beginners was Macedonia’s for 2024.
Stolevski’s prolific output is hard won: he made 25 shorts across 17 years before You Won’t Be Alone and had written more than a dozen feature scripts, but found it difficult to get a foothold in the Australian industry in order to move into long-form.
True-ish follows Janet Paine, a well-meaning but deeply insecure Manhattan PR executive with a specialty for smear campaigns. A toxic build-up of stress, alcohol and miscommunication leads her to get relocated to the Balkans for a job that sounds noble – director of outreach at a ‘peace lab’ – but in reality involves generating fake news to target political regimes on the fringes of the EU.
According to the Variety article, True-ish “will be financed with support from Australian and European federal and state funding agencies and local tax incentives.” IF has approached Causeway Films for clarification of the financing.
In 2023, Stolevski told IF that in addition to True-ish he is also developing with Causeway All The Boys Are Here, a queer love story that crosses different eras, exploring what queerness used to be, and what it is now.
Of his relationship with Ceyton and Jennings, he said: “Formally, I have a couple of features I want to shoot next that Kristina and Sam are in charge of. Informally, I don’t know if I ever want to make a film without Kristina or Sam again.”