Tony Gatlif: The Algerian Romani man who became a director of French films
When Tony Gatlif came into the world, his future prospects were not great. He was born in Algeria in 1948 as Michel Dahmani into an extremely impoverished family.
His father was a member of a Berber tribe called the Kabyle and his mother was a Romani woman whose family left Andalusia in Spain for Africa.
Music, acting, directing
From 1954–1962, Algeria fought its war for independence from France. In 1960, at the age of 12, Gatlif moved to France, where he wandered between Marseille and Paris.
He ended up in a reformatory. However, he was taken in by a tutor there who recognized his talent and led him to take interest in acting and composing music, to which Gatlif later added his interest in film directing and screenwriting.
To top it all off, he also became the producer of his own films. Through his studies at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he developed into a unique composer and one of the most respected film directors in the world, especially among those who have had enough of Hollywood’s never-ending kitsch and who like films about the culture and the lives of ordinary, poor people.
The song “Arrinconamela” from the film Vengo (I Come)
Gatlif has received many awards for his films. As he himself says: “I don’t like American cinematography. It’s not because I’m a racist, but it’s because such cinematography says things which I dislike.”
The beautiful, infinitely sad Asia Argento dances after a great disappointment in love in this scene from the film Transylvania.
Interest in his Romani origins
Gatlif started taking an interest in his Romani origins in the 1980s. He traveled through Andalusia (part of southern Spain) and then France, where he took an interest in local Romani culture.
In Andalusia, Gatlif made two short films with local flamenco performers, after which he made a feature-length film called Les Princes about the lives of French Roma (here the whole film can be viewed online with English subtitles). In the Czech Republic, two of his brilliant films have been screened in cinemas and on television, both about Romani people in the countries where they are set, Gadjo Dilo [Crazy Stranger] and Swing.
Gatlif’s excellent film Latcho Drom [Safe Journey], about the migration of Romani people from India to Spain via Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and France, is also available on YouTube. There is a lot of singing and almost no dialogue in the film, so you do not need subtitles for it.
Excerpts of Asian Romani music from the film Latcho Drom
Latcho Drom
In Latcho Drom, the Roma onscreen are playing the roles of their ancestors. It is amazing to realize how Romani music has changed over the generations, being enriched again and again with elements of local culture everywhere they live, and thus developing into a perfect state of beauty in each culture.
However, the fact that Roma are often not accepted by their surroundings is naturally part of the film. Do not look for any fake romance here – Gatlif complements reality in his films with his own life experiences.
“Probably everyone has seen Latcho Drom. The Romani political and intellectual elite have their own opinion about it, but I don’t trust those people very much. They are a bit jealous, they say that I’m mixing everything up, that I’m showing poverty and music and bad habits and so on, but I just want to defend the victims of injustice. I want people from the Western world to have the opportunity to look into the Romani world and Romani households and see what it’s like there. Some will choose their poverty as a weapon in the fight for justice for the Romani people; I chose music,” says Gatlif in an interview with Karolína Ryvolová for the Czech magazine RESPEKT, reprinted by the iLiteratura.cz news server.
Gadjo Dilo
Gadjo Dilo [Crazy Stranger] takes place in rural Romania (the whole film is available online, but not with English subtitles). In it, a French young man (the “crazy” non-Romani man of the title) is looking for a specific Romani singer and has to learn to get along with the people from a settlement of Vlax Roma.
Through the film, the viewer gets to know their customs, their lives, and their music, but it ends tragically, with a pogrom on the settlement committed by their white neighbours. As Gatlif himself has said, “Gadjo Dilo is a cult film. In it, I tried to express the incredible ability of the Roma to always rise from the dust and to move on. However, Latcho Drom and Swing had a much greater effect, because through that musical concept I reached a much larger number of people, at least the 10 million Roma there are in the world.”
“Tutti Frutti Te Kelas” from the film Gadjo Dilo
Swing
Gatlif’s film Swing (the whole film is available online here in French) is about the touching childhood love between a French boy and a Romani girl. The film is interspersed with “Gypsy jazz”, of course, but above all it is about the coexistence of people from different minorities: Arabs, Jews and Roma.
Their joint musical creations demonstrate what the enemies of multiculturalism are so fond of denying today: that the blending of different cultures enriches everyone. “Music says what words cannot,” says Gatlif, and in each of his films he proves that this is indeed the case.
“Peace Song”, excerpt of Arabs, Jews and Roma making music together from the film Swing
Liberté – Korkoro (Liberty)
The film Liberté – Korkoro was inspired by a Romani man who fled the Nazis with the aid of the French population. It shows viewers the subject of the Holocaust of the Roma (referred to by some as the Porajmos), which has yet to be documented through film.
Gatlif has described Korkoro as “a rare cinematic tribute to all those murdered during the Porajmos.” In addition to the story of a Romani gang, the film also tells the story of Yvette Lundy, a French teacher who served in the French resistance and was deported to a Nazi concentration camp for forging passports for Romani people.
Gatlif originally intended to make a documentary on this subject, but a lack of background material led him to eventually turn it into a drama. The whole film is also available online (without English subtitles).
Excerpts from the film Korkoro
Romani culture is the most despised
“I have experienced war, I saw people having their throats slit in the vineyards. It was disgusting and I had nightmares about it. I did not see humanity there. Maybe that conditioned my life as a filmmaker. When you make films, the first thing you have to do is make movies for ordinary people. We are not ‘stars’ and we have no interest in being ‘stars’. We make films because we love the people who love movies. It’s a source of pride to us that people go to our films and get to know us. The people who call themselves ‘stars’ are idiots,” Gatlif said in an interview with www.objectifgard.com.
It’s the same with his music, including the songs he has arranged or composed for his films. “I cannot live without cinema! It would be the same without music! That’s life, no matter what you say. Music is also a characteristic of every culture and is very important to Romani culture, which is unfortunately the most despised in the world. When people say that ‘Gypsies are thieves’, it makes me sick!”
