Winner of the Queer Lion in Venice, Goran Stolevski’s film revolves around a set of characters living together in a house in North Macedonia.

Winner of the Queer Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in the Horizons section, writer-director Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za pocetnici) is a fizzy, huggable portrait of a self-made, roughly blended queer family.

Thanks to backstory adeptly woven into the improvisational dialogue, we learn that Dita is ethnically Kosovar, which means she can “pass” in wider North Macedonian society more easily than quick-tempered Sauda, who is from a Roma background. (The Roma ethnic minority still faces racist prejudice throughout the Balkans.) The two women have set up house together in the home Dita inherited from her late parents, and live there with Sauda’s daughters, teenager Vanessa (Mia Mustafa) and six-year-old Mia (Dzada Selim, a total scene-stealer), as well as Toni, who brings a steady procession of temporary lovers in and out the door. There are also a couple of teen lesbians who’ve been thrown out of their own homes to whom Dita and Sauda have offered shelter. There’s a sense that a goodly portion of the local gay and Roma communities have crashed on the couches in the house at one point or another.

Although Sauda’s death casts an inevitable gloom over the story a third of the way in, Stolevski (who made last year’s Of an Age) wrings a surprising amount of comedy out of the situation. He demonstrates a sure touch with non-professional and younger actors, drawing out very accomplished performances, particularly from Selim as the flamboyant but warmhearted Ali. Similarly, the scenes among the Roma people feel authentic but not prettified, offering a glimpse of how rough life is in this oppressed community.

Still, there’s hope tolerance is growing based on one of the funniest interchanges in the film, when the characters come looking for an AWOL Ali and get nowhere when they ask people if they know him — until they say they’re looking for “gay Ali.” “Oh yeah, he’s in such and such a house,” is roughly the reply. It’s not much, but it’s a sign that attitudes are changing in Skopje, the Balkans and far beyond, even if there’s still a long way to go.