DJ Ahmet Review (Sarajevo Film Festival 2025)
Rural areas, anywhere in the world, hold tight to their traditions. For some, folklore offers a rich weave of legends and myths, stories to pass the time. For others, cultural heritage acts as a compass, used to shape morals and regulate behaviour within families. Often, it seeps into private life and takes the form of quiet subjection. Rules are dragged along like curses across generations, now clearly obsolete and asking for reassessment. That, too, is a cultural process: the battle each generation must pick for itself.
DJ Ahmet enters this scene and suggests a way to challenge it, with humour and flair. Like a delicate, exorcising dance against outworn conventions. It is refreshing, stylish, and (I kid you not) a vibe!
We are in a village in North Macedonia. Our vigil-hero is Ahmet, a spirited teenager with a face a sight for sour (casting directorsโ) eyes. After the death of his mother, he is taken out of school to herd sheep with his father and his muted young brother. Goodwill Ahmet, though, is inclined to wander the beats of music, and next to his brother, dance through life. His world is disrupted by the arrival of Aya, a TikTok-minded, club-curious girl returning from Germany. Ahmet encounters the feeling of love in his new neighbour, and his whole existence is punctuated by the mission to release her from an upcoming arranged marriage.
Ahmet longs to revel in his youth, but the village has other plans. The landscape, however, seems to side with him.
The camera, too, pays attention to the land. Long panning shots capture the hills and forests, while the mosque echoes its prayers and the women exchange gossip and dreams. The sheep scatter across the terrain. Clubbers are raving in the woods. And as Aya is training for her choreographed rebellion, Ahmet (and his missing twentieth sheep) is caught in the middle.
My thirsty mind read DJ Ahmet mainly as a story of female liberation set against a Balkan backdrop, backed by a boy who might lack formal education but is high in emotional cultivation. That said, the film blends thrills, humour, and joy into something more layered than it first appears. For humour to land, it must reflect the personalities on screen. Director and writer Georgi M. Unkovski, aware of how complicit a society can become, manages to craft a story capable of challenging prevailing, anachronistic ideas and bridging them with the desires of a new, freer generation.
He is helped greatly by the locals, who are hilarious by nature. Most of the cast are non-professionals. The casting process reportedly lasted four months. Arif Jakup (Ahmet) comes from a family of shepherds. With hardly anyone in the crew speaking the language, the script had to be translated into Turkish before it could be passed on to the actors. My own heritage (born and raised in North Macedonia of Greece) compels me to acknowledge the cultural overlap embedded in this setting. A territory ruled by many and claimed by few, villages in this land are perhaps the purest living example of the Balkan cultural epitome. Dare me if this picture is not projecting the absurd significance of it all.
Now, truth be told ,DJ Ahmet, for all its maturity in addressing outdated traditions, could use some trimming. A joke is good once; on the second round it falls flat. But the laughs are real, the characters are unforgettable, and the film earns its place.
DJ Ahmet premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival to great reception, and screened at the 2025 Sarajevo Film Festival in the Feature Film Competition Programme. Rumour has it, itโs the first North Macedonian film to ever enter the festival.
DJ Ahmet / Dir. & Writer: Georgi M. Unkovski / Cinematography: Naum Doksevski / Production: Ivan Unkovski, Ivana Shekutkoska / North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia
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