There is powerful dark magic at the heart of Australian-Macedonian filmmaker Goran Stolevski’s spellbinding movie You Won’t Be Alone, which enjoyed its Australian premiere at the current Sydney Film Festival (SFF) after debuting at Sundance. Shot in and around a remote village clustered near the peak of a Serbian mountain, doubling for the land where he was born, Stolevski’s fantastical film depicts the terrible consequences of a deal made not with the devil, but a witch.
The spark that would ignite this dark fairytale came to him in the witching hour. ‘I was going to the London Film Festival, but living in Bristol at the time, which meant a three-hour bus ride in the morning at 6am, and then back at midnight,’ he recalls. ‘It’s often when I’m super exhausted and I’m kind of in a different space that a feeling hits, or an image.
