NORWICH FILM FESTIVAL - DJ AHMET

Marcy Webb 16 November 2025

North Macedonian director Georgi M. Unkovski’s debut feature.

Set for a March release from Conic (more than a year after its Sundance debut), DJ Ahmet is North Macedonian director Georgi M. Unkovski’s debut feature after two acclaimed shorts. Outside of a few examples (Goodbye 20th Century, Before the Rain, Honeyland and the works of Goran Stolevski), Macedonian cinema has largely been ignored by international distributors, but perhaps something will shift. DJ Ahmet bears comparison to another recent Conic release, Holy Cow, with its coming of age focus on a rural teenage farmhand dealing with familial loss, a burgeoning romance and the conflicts that arise, but it differs with its Yörük cultural specificity, with cinematographer Naum Doksevski paying close attention to vast landscapes of fields, mountains and trees, dances and rituals (the most stunning shot is the silhouette of a kiss between the shifting colours of fireworks).

While Unkovski’s short Pepi and Muto created dry comedy out of the trappings of the police procedural, DJ Ahmet is more interested in dramatically contrasting modernity (going viral on social media, needing a password that honours God) and tradition. Unlike other cinematic DJs like DJ Tillu, Ahmet is more of an amateur using what’s at his disposal at a place largely without music venues (dancing to Shakira is banned in the house), accidentally leading a flock of sheep to a gig, bartering a pink dyed sheep for speakers (affixed to a tractor) and making use of the boxy PC at the mosque that’s supposed to play prayers from its steeple but actually broadcasts the Windows XP sound to the entire village. It’s a similar set up to another film in the festival, Synthesize Me, where a Mexican girl inherits her mother’s synthesisers but causes a town-wide power cut to her father’s displeasure. DJ Ahmet accepts that being a pink sheep, in going against what’s expected, is better than being a black sheep.