‘DJ Ahmet’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Georgi M Unkovski. North Macedonia/Czech Republic/Serbia, Croatia. 2025. 99mins.

“Music is the drugs for everybody,” a person declares half manner into this coming of age charmer, encapsulating one of many important themes of this story a few teenage boy whose huge ambitions are at odds with the fact of life in a rural North Macedonian village. Filmmaker Georgi M Unkovski employs music in numerous varieties in his function debut, approaching its conflict between youthful riot and conventional tradition with a non-judgmental heat and an open coronary heart. 

Coming of age charmer

DJ Ahmet premieres within the World Cinema Dramatic Competitors at Sundance, the place Unkovski’s quick Sticker performed in 2019. Whereas his function script is slightly unfastened in locations, its crowd-pleasing sweetness ought to see the movie make a reputation for itself past the pageant. 

Music is a type of escape for 15-year-old Ahmet (Arif Jakup) and his youthful brother Naim (Agush Agushev), who radiate pleasure as they dance collectively every time they get the possibility. The pair stay with their gruff and grieving father (Aksel Mehmet) and, following his mom’s loss of life, Ahmet has needed to give up faculty to assist his dad with the sheep.  Naim has stopped talking, main their father to recurrently cart him off to the native healer.

Early scenes between the boys easily set up their relationship, which comes throughout as a closeness without having for dialog. The tousle-headed Jakup brings a successful shyness to Ahmet, who’s however fiercely protecting of his brother, though it’s Agushev who proves to be a pint-sized scene stealer at nearly each flip.

Music is what takes them into the orbit of native lady Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), who additionally makes use of it as an escape. She has been introduced again to the village from Germany for an undesired organized marriage to the older Hakan (Metin Ibahim). Unkovski doesn’t dive notably deeply into the custom of the sort of union, though it’s clear that Aya’s publicity to the broader world means she is in opposition to the plan. There’s an ulterior motive to her secret conferences together with her mates to observe a dance routine for an upcoming pageant, aided by Ahmet’s newly pimped tractor sound system. These conferences convey the prospect of romance – and hassle – for the pair.

Unkovski nods to the familiarity of his timeless themes with a evenly employed framing machine wherein a gaggle of older girls – seen solely in a distant vast shot, giving us the urge to attract nearer in the direction of them – have interaction in an act of collective storytelling and dream recollection that references the story we’re being informed. Including this fable-like factor helps the viewers settle for the extra outlandish components of the drama, together with the sudden look of a shiny pink sheep. 

The author/director elicits such partaking performances from his largely younger forged that it helps clean over the episodic plotting, which doesn’t at all times transfer seamlessly between the segments involving Ahmet and Naim and people that includes the rising relationship between Ahmet and Aya. Whereas the help from the older era, led by Mehmet and Selpin Kerim, as Aya’s father, is strong, their characters are primarily there as easy opposition to their kids and will use extra complexity. In the meantime, the scoring from composer siblings Alen and Nenad Sinkauz gooses its extra conventional components with energetic brass.

The recalcitrant sheep are an efficient working (and bleating) gag, and Unkovski reveals a expertise for comedy, together with makes an attempt by the village to make use of ”expertise” across the name to prayer, that are deftly mined for each humour and poignancy. The usage of sluggish movement to emphasize moments or moods works higher in some locations than in others, however Unkovski and cinematographer Naum Doksevski make artistic use of sunshine, from magic hour pictures to some surprising fireworks.

DJ Ahmet has a vibrant power basically, because of that day-glo sheep and the intense tones of the standard girls’s clothes. Unkovski’s movie could also be singing from a well-recognized hymn sheet, however he makes that a part of its allure.