The 31st Sarajevo Film Festival audience favorite "DJ Ahmet" is about a yörük boy who lives in the Macedonian mountains, "while navigating his father’s expectations, a conservative community and his first experience in love," as the program explains.
We first see Ahmet in the classroom, sharing earphones with a friend, listening to dance music, having great fun. The moment is broken when the teacher enters the room and all stand to attention. The tone of the film is set when the teacher, in a classroom fitted with Turkish flags and a Mustafa Kemal Atatürk portrait, like any classroom in Türkiye, calls out "Ahmet" and four students stand up at once, and the audience is won over. This is Sarajevo, where blond kids playing football on the streets call out to one another, "Ahmet! Mustafa!" And then a plot element we are familiar with from Anatolian films comes into play: our hero Ahmet has to cut his school term short in order to go help his father with the sheep. The most recent example of this I’ve seen was "The Last Birds of Passage" (2021) by Iffet Eren Danışman Boz, about the lives of nomads in the Taurus Mountains. In that film, the kid being taken out of school becomes some sort of moral arc, whereas in this one, it is just the prelude to Ahmet’s story in which he earns his nickname DJ.
In "DJ Ahmet," there is a very authoritarian father, who, we learn, has been hardened after the death of his wife. There is also a much younger brother who has stopped speaking after the death of his mother. In this sad atmosphere, Ahmet is trying to be a teenager, listening to music, herding his sheep. There is a beautiful moment early on where Ahmet looks longingly into the forest after he has an exchange with his soon-to-be sweetheart. It is the call of the wild, but then we find out, a call of something that is actually very urban. In the following scene, Ahmet steals away from his bed, walks into the forest, and starts seeing lights and hearing sounds. I thought at this moment that he was going to enter an alternate universe in order to flee his problems at home. Ahmet does indeed enter an alternate universe, but one of urban kids who are throwing a rave in the forest. This, director Georgi M. Unkovski explains in the Q and A, was the original image that got the whole project started.
As if this wasn’t magic realism enough – this is already in the trailer, so no spoiler – Ahmet’s sheep break free and follow his lead into the rave. The following is like a Bacchanalia, one of the oldest traditions in these Balkan Mountains. During this melee, Ahmet also manages to catch a glimpse of his sweetheart Aya, who clearly has also not told her parents where she is. This, of course, becomes their little secret and draws them together. But before Ahmet can engage in romantic escapades, he must collect his sheep, and he does, miraculously with only one missing – and which, to great comic effect – returns toward the end of the film.
Aya’s initial entry into the film’s frame has also been through music, wearing (a bit unconvincingly, I thought) the whole red, flowery regalia of a Balkan girl, walking into the tobacco field. This is where Ahmet takes note of her, and literally runs away rather than speak. We discover that Aya is preparing a dance routine with her similarly attired friends for the autumn festival – and the combination of the yazma, petticoats, shalwar and the techno dance music is a marvel to behold. We learn that she has been betrothed to a well-to-do young man – and this is treated till the last moment not as a tragedy as it would be in a Turkish film, but a phase of a nomad girl’s life. This is where Unkovski’s soft touch comes in, not being of the community and being very respectful of their traditions as an outsider. Unkovski’s credentials as a documentary maker also make themselves felt as he includes scenes of both the festival and the preparations for the wedding. The festival scenes especially reminded me of the documentary "Honeyland" (2019) following the life of the indomitable Hatice Muratova in the very same mountains.
It is again in this documentary impulse that we see the father take the mute son to a "healer" – a theme that runs in a few films at the festival, including one in the competition selection, the Belarusian "White Snail." The "healer," as expected, combines religious faith, folk knowledge with New Age discourse. In the film, the traditional religious faith is represented by a hapless imam who gets help from Ahmet to set up his Gmail account and the megaphone system for the call for prayers, with a lot of mishaps which has the audience in peals of laughter. When Aya asks Ahmet if he knows someone with a good sound system, I think Ahmet is going to use the minaret megaphones to blast out his sweetheart’s dance music, but he finds another solution – again kudos to Unkovski for discerning what might or might not be acceptable for the villagers who’ve hosted the making of his film. The minaret’s megaphones come into play toward the end, during Aya’s wedding proceedings, and enable her to make her own choices about her future.
Unkovski’s "DJ Ahmet" proves that when you work honestly with the people you’re depicting and approach your subject with affection rather than hostility – which sadly often is the case in Turkish cinema depicting Anatolia – the characters and the landscape will reveal a positive energy and human truths that are universal and appreciated by audiences anywhere.
