Obituary of Tony Gatlif

French film director Tony Gatlif, who has died aged 77, was often called the “Gypsy auteur” and his films often focused on Gypsy communities and their music. From 1975 to 2025, Gatlif made more than 20 films, starting with La Tête en Ruine (The Shattered Head). This film was never released, and throughout the 1970s and 80s he struggled to get financing for his films and then find a distributor before finally achieving success with Lacho Drom (1993, the title means “good journey” in Romani). International arthouse hit Lacho Drom is a meditative travelogue that combines footage of musical performances in contemporary gypsy communities in Istanbul, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France and Spain with historical recreations of such communities in Rajasthan and the Egyptian oasis.

“Lacho Drom” conveys the centuries-long migration from Asia to Western Europe of the nomadic people we now call the Gypsies or Gypsies as a fable told entirely in imagery and music. There is no voiceover, talking heads or text; instead, Gatlif allows the colorful scenery and musical performances to captivate the audience. This is an idealized portrait of the Romani people, not a documentary (as some have called it), and although Gatlif depicts the discrimination and persecution experienced by Romani communities, its emphasis was on celebrating the beauty and artistry of the Romani people.

Following the success of Lacho Droma, Gatlif wrote and directed a feature film every couple of years, most recently Ange (2025). All of these films were dramas and tended to focus either on the gypsy community – Mondo (1995), Gadjo Dilo (1997), Vengo (2000), Swing (2001), Corcoro (2009) – or were road films in which the protagonists travel through France and then head to Eastern Europe or North Africa in search of meaning and origins. His 2004 film Exiles won Gatlif the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.

He was born Boualem Dahmani in Algeria, when Algeria was part of France, to a Kabyle (Berber) father and a mother of Spanish and Gypsy descent. He said his impoverished family lived in slums on the outskirts of the city until 1960, when, as Algeria’s war of independence raged, they joined a mass exodus of French Algerians to the south of France. A troubled teenager, he regularly got into fights and engaged in antisocial behavior, which resulted in him being sent to a reform school.

He began using the name Tony Gatlif – picking a surname from a local park in Algiers – to avoid the Camargue region police, who knew Dahmani all too well. A meeting with actor Michel Simon in 1966 led to Gatlif enrolling in a drama course in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, after Simon wrote a letter of recommendation.

Gatlif worked part-time as an actor while writing scripts for his future films. His second film, La Terre au Ventre (Womb of the Earth, 1978), was about a young mother and her four daughters exiled from Algeria. His third film, Corre, Gitano (Run, Gypsy, 1981), was filmed in Spain and centers on a young Gypsy accused of a crime he did not commit.

Gatlif now found his theme and has rarely deviated from it since. The Princes (1983), about a petty, patriarchal gypsy criminal living in a French housing estate, brought him some attention, but it was Lacho Drome that made him a famous director. The film won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes in 1993, and growing interest in gypsy music attracted a significant international audience to Gatlif’s films.

Gaggio Dilo (The Mad Foreigner, 1997) is about a young French man who finds himself in a Romanian gypsy community, begins a relationship with a gypsy woman, and then witnesses an anti-gypsy pogrom. In the career-defining roles of Romain Duris and Rhone Hartner, Gadjo Dilo performed so well that Gatlif cast the two young stars in his next film, Je Suis Né d’Une Cigogne (1998, The Stork’s Children), a road movie that owed much to the films of Jean-Luc Godard of the ’60s, which received negative reviews and poor box office returns.

He returned to Rome with Vengo and Swing, set in Spain and France respectively, films that focused on flamenco and manusha jazz musicians, with threadbare plots thrown in for good measure. Gatlif’s screenwriting skills were tenuous, and the narratives in these two films, as well as two later road movies, Exiles (again with Duris, this time heading to Algeria) and Transylvania (2006), are often clunky, no matter how striking the setting and music. Corcoro (2009), a historical drama about the Nazi persecution of Gypsies in occupied France, attempted to convincingly convey the Porajmos (Gypsy Holocaust).

Gatlif remained unfazed by such criticism and continued to make films his way, even as audiences had declined in recent years. In 2015, he was awarded the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He fell ill and died in Arles, in the south of France, while working on the film.

He is survived by his wife Delphine and three children: Elsa, Valentin and Lucia.