DJ Ahmet

DJ AHMET
Writer & Director ~ Georgi M. Unkovski
2025, North Macedonia-Czech Republic-Serbia-Croatia
Stars ~ Arif Jakup, Agush Agushev, Dora Akan Zlatanova

One of those minor bildungsroman that leaves you life-affirmed and takes up a small corner in your affection whilst the mainstream is mostly bombast and performative emotions. Its worth is in showing a small far away community and highlighting that the emotional simularities between cultures aren’t so conflicted at core. Ahmet is a typical fifteen year-old, a Yuruk teen from a remote Macedonian village, trying to cope with the loss of his mother and a difficult father who takes him out of school to work sheperding, as well as looking out for a younger brother that hasn’t spoken since their loss. Ahmet isn’t even really an odd-one-out, an outsider, just coping with domestic and social circumstance and first love. The pink sheep may symbolise otherwise, but it just needs time to find its way back.  

What is perhaps enlightening is the portrayal of how the contemporary TikTok age reaches such a relatively isolated and traditional community. Indeed, if anything, it is almost conventional for these stories that the enemy here is tradition and the patriarchy. While the mosque is broadcasting prayers from a PC (some of the film’s best laughs come from this), the men are still trying to marry off teenage daughters to their adult sons. The location offers many, many gorgeous vistas, making this, as Daniel Eagan says, “both wildly exotic and completely down to earth.”  He also says that

Jakup, who's in almost every scene as Ahmet, gives a solid if occasionally stiff performance. He can be charming, especially with his younger brother, but his character is too withdrawn and hesitant for much of the movie.

Jakup’s performance offers an unpolished natural niceness and sudden expressions that charm in their spontaneity. But not everyone is a go-getter or fiery or a traumatised lover, and if there’s anything the coming-of-age genre is good at it is showing how the ordinary is extraordinary to someone, how dilemmas are melodrama. And how limitation inspires invention: with the right motivation – music and love – Ahmet turns his tractor into a sound-system, for example. There’s a maintained sense that he is just on the verge: of being music-obsessed, of defying his father, of falling in love. Incidentally, Arid Jakup comes from that very village. 

It is Dora Akan Zlatanova as Aya that steals the show, rightfully so to knock Ahmet off his feet, sparkling with a worldiness that this town has little idea about. Yes, there are secret festivals happening just outside, but the patriarch aren’t truly aware or consenting, so they are not about to agree to her dance routine with which she hopes to sabotage her arranged marriage. The music itself appropriately goes from EDM to traditional, bursting out and blurring in but never quite dominating the set-pieces until it needs to.

It is not a film that feels angry or unsympathetic to any of its characters, but one that broadcasts empathy and the generational struggle between what is coming and what is already happening. If its simple message is to be brave, that’s powerful enough for a little funny film. We know he’ll be okay.