Georgi Unkovski’s thoroughly entertaining DJ Ahmet brings us a familiar story of country mouse-city mouse teen romance inventively recast in a rural, predominantly Muslim community in North Macedonia.
Ahmet lives with his father and younger brother, Naim, who make a sparse living from their small herd of sheep and sell tobacco. At the film’s opening, Ahmet’s father withdraws the boy from school so he can help out more at home. It’s another coming down in the world in the wake of his mother’s death, not just a tragedy but a stigma to some in the mostly tradition-bound community. “You should be here with us,” Ahmet’s father tells him, and Ahmet, never one to shirk his duties, submits without argument. Though father and sons appear stoic beneath their shared cloud, each has his separate way of expressing grief. In Naim’s case it’s remaining mute, a decision Ahmet empathizes with, but which the father misunderstands as an illness or a curse, leading him to carry the younger boy off to a healer most days, leaving Ahmet to tend to business.
Through this business, we begin to learn of Ahmet’s way of coping with his mother’s death, as well as his cleverness, generosity, and tech savviness. If Ahmet doesn’t seem to have big ambitions for himself, he is nevertheless a young man in a contemporary world, no corner of which remains untouched by social media. In this remote village, he more than most, it seems, is riding the incoming waves of the future-present and he can be inspired, to a point, by the lives and imaginations of others far away.
In another early scene, arriving at a neighbor’s home to retrieve Naim—both adorable and an unfailingly precise and genius comic sidekick—Ahmet is introduced to Aya, a young woman who’s just come from Germany for an arranged marriage. Ahmet is stricken, as is Aya, and the illicit romance is on. The love story moves rapidly, the chemistry between Ahmet and Aya, and its endpoint, as obvious to the community as it is to the viewer. There are twists, but they are less the point of the film, it seems, than its broader narrative of expanding freedoms and finding one’s voice through music and dance as well as through everyday intimate dialogue, in finding the courage to speak up for others in a community that, despite the permissiveness it allows around its traditions, remains committed to these and its minor hierarchies when pressed.
In addition to its deft direction and editing, DJ Ahmet triumphs due to its casting. Arif Jakup, a local kid from the village where the film was shot, is reminiscent of Buster Keaton in his timing and comic responses. One pursuit scene actually culminates with him performing a Keatonesque physical gag. But Jakup is hardly stonefaced. The pursuit scene is driven by Ahmet’s real desperation and compassion, emotions that give DJ Ahmet a depth it might not have as a more pure romantic comedy. The soundscape of the film is another win, deftly intertwining strains of folk music with the danceable pop that binds its leads together, and then opportunistically amplifying the latter from a rebellious bleat emerging from low-grade speakers into a thumping and joyous score.
More than a film about the pleasures and pains of first love, DJ Ahmet is also a fun and loving ode to the bonds of family and community, of understanding and enjoying their comfort and support without allowing them to tie you down—not quite.
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