NZIFF 2025 Film Review

NZIFF 2025 Craccum Coverage | DJ Ahmet

Sparks fly when TikTok meets Folk Tale in rural North Macedonia.

Trevor Pronoso, Lewis Creed

09 Jul 2025 — 4 min read

Image courtesy of Films Boutique.

Jointly written by Lewis Matheson Creed & Trevor Pronoso

DJ Ahmet is an audience pleasing debut from Director Georgi M. Unkovski, featuring wholesome performances from its child actors, tense moments of small-town drama and laugh-out-loud moments that we feel add up to an overall hopeful and optimistic film.

Let’s be real, adolescent brains are simply undercooked. Yet, what is lost in the process of ‘maturity’ nevertheless evinces an unmistakable ‘authenticity’ of emotional growth and newfound knowledge. The film’s plot almost reads like a fairytale story you’d be given in your average CompLit course: poor boy loves rich girl, rich girl loves poor boy, both parents forbid their relationship due to irreconcilable class differences, poor boy climbs atop a the village’s tallest building and professes his love for the entire town to hear, the villagers gossip and reappear throughout like a Greek chorus, and both lovers live happily ever after (We still disagree whether the film resolves into a “happy ending”, but our adolescent characters do have us questioning our preconceived notions regarding familial security and personal freedom.)

To the west, TikTok may be the latest moral peril facing adolescents in the never ending battle against communist influence. But within rural Northern Macedonia—a place composed of rolling hills, tobacco fields and paternalistic communes—the distant din of EDM overdubs the call to prayer with a call to revolution. Music becomes the rallying cry for the younger generations’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, the audiovibratory middle finger of a universal struggle for the right to autonomously express oneself, be it both culturally and economically. In a world that actively retrofits us into predetermined precepts of the ‘right way’ of growing up, our two lovebirds represent the ever-present impasses that destabilise the delicate intersections between love, family, and labour, and technology.

Okay that was a bit melodramatic, but DJ Ahmet remains a film where the healing power of music is the central focus. And adults need to listen to the kids; let music play and the healing begin. Nothing else screams modernity than Yörük teenage girls in a conservative rural village mimicking Shakira’s dance moves for a TikTok duet.

While DJ Ahmet doesn’t break new ground, it provides a well-executed and geographically-specific take on the time-old tale of youth escapism amidst their limited cultural and economic conditions. Not all stories can become fairytales, but at least all stories can be scored by music. Music is our hope, and DJ Ahmet has brilliant sound design. An enticing sneak preview of this year's offerings at the NZIFF.