The young boy who gives DJ Ahmet, the debut feature from Georgi M. Unkovski, its name is juggling two demands in his Macedonian village. How to please his stern father at the farm and how to take care of his apparently mute brother at home. It’s hard enough balancing both, but then comes a third complication: love—or perhaps teenage infatuation.
The meet-cute, if one can call it that, happens on a farm. His response is to flee from the girl whose beauty has struck him so. But that, of course, is not the end of the affair. Ahmet and Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova ) will meet again.
As Ahmet, first-time actor Arif Jakup is the film’s protagonist and its main asset. His unlined face radiates a subtle cheer despite the tough love he receives from his father, a man’s whose harshness both mirrors the vigorous patriarchal society he’s raised his kids in and reflects the grief held in his heart for his dead wife.
Jakup’s Ahmet is the key to the movie, along with his relationships — to his father, to his brother, to the girl, to the village — that lend DJ Ahmet its narrative and gives Unkovski (who wrote the script) an opportunity to say a few things about generational differences, traditional norms, and technology. The first two things are responsible for the film’s philosophic undertow; the last is also an instrument for comedy. In a gag that sets up a key plot point towards the end, a serviceable joke is made out of a combination of Microsoft Windows and a minaret.
As the film’s title seems to inform us, music is an important part of the film and the story really begins with Ahmet grooving to music. It is deployed through an interesting sound design that tells the viewer this kid’s relationship with these sounds is a peculiar one. And when, in the second act, Ahmet sees Aya again, two things of high importance to the modern teenager are present in the atmosphere: music and Tiktok.
The first supplies the environment for a wacky situation involving sheep storming a rave; the latter makes Ahmet, as he is later told, “the first celebrity” from the village.
Unkovski’s film is sympathetic to the plight of young people navigating romance and it is also alert to the conservative ideals of the older generation (those ideals are the film’s true villains). Even so, there’s no doubt that his film is firmly on the side of the young. Ahmet is the hero of the tale and it is his coming-of-age we are watching. Aya, by contrast, is worldly, has arrived from Germany, and has only visited the village because she is supposed to marry a man her family has chosen. Tweak the script a bit and their love story is a summer romance destined to end with Aya breaking the shepherd boy’s heart.
So, from a narrative perspective, there isn’t much in DJ Ahmet that is different from the average boy-in-love-with-forbidden-girl story. Unkovski’s brilliance is connected to how well he has taken the troubled young love story and its accoutrements to a non-mainstream locale. It is (almost) Romeo and Juliet in Muslim Macedonia. Maybe except for one detail: Shakespeare never had one of his young lovers lie supine while enjoying a first kiss under a sky coloured by fireworks.
Director, screenwriter: Georgi M. Unkovski
Cast: Arif Jakup, Agush Agushev, Dora Akan Zlatanova, Aksel Mehmet
Producers: Ivan Unkovski, Ivana Shekutkoska
Cinematography: Naum Doksevsksi
Music: Alen Sinkauz, Nenad Sinkauz
Editing: Michal Reich
Production design: Dejan Gosevski, Aleksandra Chevreska
Production companies: Cinema Futura
International sales: Films Boutique
Venue: Sundance (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In Turkish and Macedonian
99 minutes