The French film director Tony Gatlif, who has died aged 77, was regularly described as “cinema’s Gypsy auteur”, so often did his films focus on Roma communities and their music. Between 1975 and 2025, Gatlif directed more than 20 films, beginning with La Tête en Ruine (The Ruined Head). That film was never released, and he struggled throughout the 1970s and 80s to get funding for his films, and then to find a distributor, before finally breaking through with Latcho Drom (1993, the title being Romany for “good journey”).
An international arthouse hit, Latcho Drom is a meditative travelogue that blends footage of staged musical performances in contemporary Roma communities in Istanbul, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France and Spain, with historic recreations of such communities in Rajasthan and an Egyptian oasis. Latcho Drom conveys the centuries-long migration from Asia to western Europe of a nomadic people we now call Gypsies or Roma, as a fable told entirely in images and music. There is no voiceover, talking heads or text; instead Gatlif lets the striking settings and musical performances enchant viewers.
It is an idealised portrait of the Roma, not a documentary (as some labelled it), and while Gatlif portrays the discrimination and persecution Roma communities experience, his emphasis was on celebrating Roma beauty and artistry. After the success of Latcho Drom, Gatlif went on to write and direct a feature film every couple of years, his most recent being Ange (2025). These films were all dramas and tended to focus either on a Roma community – Mondo (1995), Gadjo Dilo (1997), Vengo (2000), Swing (2001), Korkoro (2009) – or were road movies in which the protagonists drift across France, then head into eastern Europe or North Africa, seeking meaning and origins.
His 2004 film Exils won Gatlif the best director award at the Cannes film festival. He was born Boualem Dahmani in Algiers, when Algeria was a part of France, to a Kabyle (Berber) father and a mother of Spanish and Roma heritage. His impoverished family lived in a shantytown on the outskirts of the city, he said, until 1960 when, with the Algerian war of independence raging, they joined a huge exodus of French Algerians in relocating to the south of France.
A troubled adolescent, he regularly got into fights and engaged in antisocial behaviour, which led to him being sent to a reform school. He began using the name Tony Gatlif – choosing the surname from a local park in Algiers – so as to avoid the police in the Camargue region, who knew Dahmani too well. A meeting with the actor Michel Simon in 1966 led to Gatlif enrolling in a dramatic arts course in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris, after Simon wrote a letter of recommendation.
Gatlif worked as a jobbing actor while writing scripts for his prospective features. His second film, La Terre au Ventre (The Belly of the Earth, 1978), focused on a young mother and her four daughters, all dispossessed from Algeria. His third, Corre, Gitano (Run, Gypsy, 1981), was filmed in Spain and focused on a young Roma man accused of a crime he did not commit.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
