“A crowd-pleasing, sentimental comedy rather than a hard-hitting social realist drama.”

“Music is the medicine for everything” – a sentiment that we’ve all heard and likely found to be both hopelessly trite and incredibly true. It’s the universal language, a way to communicate with others regardless of language, origin or any of the other factors that divide the global community. This is also what director Georgi M. Unkovski uses as the impetus for his feature directorial debut DJ Ahmet (with those words being spoken verbatim), which follows the exploits of the titular character, a reserved boy growing up in a small village in North Macedonia who is struggling to connect with the world that surrounds him but finds solace in the music that gets him through his day. A very simple film, but one that is certainly not without its merits in terms of its heartfelt emotion, sincere humor and touching exploration of family and culture, the story has a lot of heart, but does come across as slightly too limited throughout. It never reaches its full potential through choosing to take the more convenient path when touching on certain ideas that would have benefitted from a slightly more inventive approach, rather than working within the same set of tropes that often form the foundation for these kinds of stories.

Coming-of-age films have become a dime a dozen, and are often the genre of choice for filmmakers selecting the subject of their debut films. The reasons are clear – these are stories that are immediately familiar, since even when we divorce the stories from the specific milieux and narrative beats, there are certain universal ideas being communicated in one way or another. This leads to feeling a genuine sense of affection for these very simple, evocative narratives. This is certainly what drove Unkovski to develop the ideas that inspire this film, creating a story of a boy navigating his adolescence, caught between his origins that are rooted in the pastoral way of life that has defined his family for generations, and his own desire to embrace modernity. Rejecting the burden of one’s ancestors is not an easy task, especially at such a young, impressionable age where someone is only just starting to learn about life and its many challenges. The film does well in showing Ahmet’s journey towards maturity (and credit must go to Arif Jakup, whose performance as the titular character is surprisingly nuanced and quite moving, becoming more complex as the story progresses), building itself on some very familiar ideas, but being nonetheless quite moving even when playing in the most obvious key that we’d expect from such a subject.

More than it is a coming-of-age film, we also find that DJ Ahmet is a beautiful portrayal of culture – in fact, it can sometimes be frustrating to see how the director so frequently approaches capturing the cultural nuances of these characters and their origins, but pulls away only moments before, never quite allowing them to flourish to their full capacity. The music, traditional costumes and overall way of life that define these people are explored throughout, never being the focus (if anything, the over-reliance on older traditions is emphasized as the source of underlying tensions throughout the film), but rather being used to contrast the rebellion of the protagonist and his desire to break free from the shackles of a past he never experienced, and therefore should not be forced to honor. Whether or not this is a wise choice on the character’s part is not made clear, nor is it particularly important, since what Unkovski was clearly hoping to communicate with this story was to show the complicated relationship between younger generations and those who came before them, a fascinating exploration of culture that may not be as thorough as we wish, but still makes some intriguing observations in the process.

DJ Ahmet is about as far from innovative as a film like this could be – it follows familiar narrative patterns, is frequently quite predictable and never does anything we have not seen before on countless occasions. However, it’s also very charming, and in spite of some pedestrian choices in terms of how the story is structured, the film does inspire genuine affection from the viewer even if it occasionally comes across as too restrictive in its approach to some of its more potentially interesting ideas. It was clearly intended to be more family-oriented fare, with the upbeat tone and frequent moments of humor (including one of the most genuinely funny scenes of the year, involving a scene-stealing imam learning how to use new technology) positioning it as a crowd-pleasing, sentimental comedy rather than a hard-hitting social realist drama. Regardless, it does prove to be a quaint slice-of-life story that leaves us mostly entertained and moved, even if we may wish that it would push a bit further with its underlying themes, since some genuinely moving commentary was waiting to be made, which would have elevated DJ Ahmet to more than merely pleasant.