By Robert St.Martin
DJ Ahmet –- the feature filmmaking debut of Georgi M. Unkovski from North Macedonia was the closing night film of this year’s SEEfest South East European Film Festival on Wednesday, May 7, at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in West Los Angeles. A North Macedonian farm boy’s love of EDM (electronic dance music) sets him on a path of small-town rebellion in the feature filmmaking debut from Georgi M. Unkovski. Unkovski is more interested in the story’s conflicts: culture clashes between traditionally religious, conservative parents and their rebellious offspring; between Muslim and secular communities; between the rich and the poor.
On the surface, Unkovksi’s film seems like a coming-of-age story of a 15-year-old rural Muslim boy in North Macedonia but the movie is much more than that. The film previously won the Best Feature Film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and at SEEfest, it was awarded the Best Feature Film and the Audience Award for Best Film.
Teenager Ahmet (Arif Jakup) is pulled out of his school in rural North Macedonia to help run his widowed father’s (Selpin Kerim) farm. That means herding sheep, harvesting tobacco, and caring for his younger brother Naim (Agush Agushev), left speechless after the sudden death of their mother. It’s a hard life made even harsher when Ahmet loses track of one of the sheep while visiting a secret, all-night rave deep in the forest. As punishment, his father banishes him from the farmhouse. Ahmet sleeps outside, awoken every dawn by a bucket of water thrown on him by his angry dad.
Also at the rave: Aya (Dora Akan Zlatanova), a neighbor who had been living with relatives in Germany. She’s facing an unwanted arranged marriage to Hakan (Metin Ibrahim), a pact she tries to sabotage by flouting her father’s strict rules. That means secretly rehearsing a hip-hop dance routine with her friends for an upcoming performance at a folk festival. Ahmet finds out about the scheme while searching for a Wi-Fi connection near Aya’s home. He offers his sound system – speakers attached to a tractor – to help them.
Rumors fly fast in a small village. Gossip escalates the innocent rehearsals into a scandalous romance, although to be honest the world does come to a halt for Ahmet whenever he sees Aya. The closer they get, the more they realize how little control they have over their lives.
DJ Ahmet provides us with a fascinating conflict between the past and the present. A muezzin (Atila Klince) struggles to master the technology required to stream a playlist of daily prayers over the village’s loudspeakers. Instead of going to a doctor, Ahmet’s father brings Naim to a “healer” (Nadzi Shaban) to restore his speech. But he’s the same kind of snake-oil grifter who’s preyed on the poor for centuries. There is the disconnect between the youth plugged into a world larger than their small mountain community of Yuruk people (a Turkish ethnic group) via their cell phones and the pastoral and deeply patriarchal lifestyle that still endures there. Unkovski derives universally understandable comedy from culturally specific situations. The plight of a technology-challenged imam whom Ahmet kindly helps on multiple occasions is a recurrent side-splitting gag. The sound of Microsoft Windows starting up has never been so funny. With every perfectly timed joke, including those involving Ahmet’s missing sheep, the film is a charming comedy.
Arif Jakup is the endearing protagonist, whose face exudes the sincerity of an untainted soul. “I like that you don’t know how to lie,” Aya tells him as the two (and their little chaperone Naim) hang out away from their respective grim realities. The extraordinary Jakup, however, doesn’t go for simplistic naiveté in his quietly soulful performance, but rather communicates Ahmet’s interiority in a shy smirk or his beaming eyes. Encased in the character’s unimposing frame, there’s a selfless bravery that prompts him to stand up for others – especially lovely Naim.
DJ Ahmet is grounded on the bruising realities of life in patriarchal societies where there’s little space for men to engage with their emotions or for women to have full agency over their lives. Unkovski bookends the film with sharp, dream-based commentary and premonitions by the local elderly women, who discuss local affairs and encourage Ahmet from afar. Unkovski’s narrative works so that the adolescent fondness between Ahmet and Aya acts as an empowering catalyst to defy conventions, whether by performing a “provocative” modern dance number in front of all the residents or adapting a tractor to become a mobile DJ setup.
