All DJs, Great and Small: Unkovski’s Debut Can’t Stop the Music
While its location might feel inherently unique, the happenings in Georgi M. Unkovski’s narrative debut DJ Ahmet sing a familiar tune. A coming-of-age trajectory defined by the formidable temptation of forbidden love fostered through the life-changing possibilities of music, this tale of a teen torn between tradition and self-fulfillment in Northern Macedonia feels overtly accessible for those satisfied with the familiar and the formulaic. Dealing specifically with a young Yuruk boy, a Turkic ethnic subgroup spread across the Balkan Peninsula, a local community festival provides the dramatic zenith as an act of rebellion towards the rigid expectations imposed upon a youthful generation faced with following the proscribed designs of their parents.
Ahmet (Arif Jakup) is a fifteen-year-old boy who lives with his widowed father and mute younger brother in an isolated Yuruk village. Yanked out of school to help his sheepherding father, Ahmet simultaneously becomes fixated on Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), a classmate from a well-to-do family who’s been betrothed to another young man she doesn’t love. But Aya is secretly planning to sabotage this plan for her future as she practices with some other village girls to perform a musical number at an upcoming festival which would provoke a scandal and circumvent the marriage. As Ahmet and Aya manifest a connection, Ahmet also leans into his love of music which was inspired by his dead mother, utilizing his access to speakers to become her dance troupe’s rehearsal DJ.
The narrative beats play out exactly as expected, and it would appear Unkovski was more interested in channeling the region’s cultural attributes through splashes of local color without any real insight or perspective beyond the most basic, and therefore universal, themes of going one’s own way despite both traditional expectations and economic realities. What’s perhaps most surprising is the vibrant soundtrack, which is a welcome reprieve thanks to a handful of catchy beats and sometimes novel sequences, like a flock of sheep crashing a pseudo youth rave.
The film’s energies feel equivalent to a Balkan version of Footloose mixed with Kurdwin Ayub’s Sonne (2022), about a trio of young Kurdish women in Austria who stir things up in the local Muslim community when they make a music video. The nonprofessional cast are all customarily appropriate, and there’s a natural chemistry which plays out between them, particularly when the focus remains on the titular Ahmet, who is played by an often charming Arif Jakup, whose awkward adolescence bolsters the performance.
But there’s just a few too many twists making DJ Ahmet feel a bit treacly, such as his younger mute brother, who has refused to speak since the death of their music-loving mother. As would be expected, events motivate the young boy to regain his voice, which is the overall metaphor involving these handful of characters learning to follow their own path. And while cinematographer Naum Doksevski (who recently shot Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners, 2023) manages to capture an encroaching sense of modernity in what otherwise feels like an incredibly isolated region (how Ahmet finagles WiFi, for instance, is a plot point), we don’t learn much about the specificity of the culture or region beyond the most basic elements. Arguably, such simplicity makes DJ Ahmet easily accessible, but this also works against the film being impactful, resembling any number of similar recent international titles, such as Franco Garcia Becerra’s Peruvian title Through Rocks and Clouds (2024), centering on a World Cup obsessed eight-year-old alpaca farmer. Simple, sweet, and perhaps a bit too disarming, familiar stakes and an ambiguous resolution make DJ Ahmet feel more mundane than it should.
Reviewed on January 26th at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (41st edition) – World Cinema Dramatic Competition section. 99 mins.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆