‘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 means into this coming of age charmer, encapsulating one of many important themes of this story a couple of teenage boy whose massive ambitions are at odds with the truth of life in a rural North Macedonian village. Filmmaker Georgi M Unkovski employs music in varied varieties in his function debut, approaching its conflict between youthful rebel 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 just a little unfastened in locations, its crowd-pleasing sweetness ought to see the movie make a reputation for itself past the competition. 

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 at any time when they get the possibility. The pair reside with their gruff and grieving father (Aksel Mehmet) and, following his mom’s dying, Ahmet has needed to stop college to assist his dad with the sheep.  Naim has stopped talking, main their father to frequently 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 profitable shyness to Ahmet, who’s nonetheless 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 significantly deeply into the custom of this kind of union, though it’s clear that Aya’s publicity to the broader world means she is towards the plan. There’s an ulterior motive to her secret conferences along with her mates to apply a dance routine for an upcoming competition, aided by Ahmet’s newly pimped tractor sound system. These conferences deliver the prospect of romance – and bother – for the pair.

Unkovski nods to the familiarity of his timeless themes with a frivolously employed framing system during which a gaggle of older girls – seen solely in a distant extensive shot, giving us the urge to attract nearer in direction of them – interact in an act of collective storytelling and dream recollection that references the story we’re being advised. 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 easy over the episodic plotting, which doesn’t all the time 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 exhibits a expertise for comedy, together with makes an attempt by the village to make use of ”know-how” across the name to prayer, that are deftly mined for each humour and poignancy. Using gradual movement to stress moments or moods works higher in some locations than in others, however Unkovski and cinematographer Naum Doksevski make inventive use of sunshine, from magic hour photographs to some sudden fireworks.

DJ Ahmet has a vibrant vitality generally, due to that day-glo sheep and the brilliant 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 attraction.