Director Tony Gatlif, who was known for films such as Gadjo Dilo exploring Roma culture, died in the Southern French town of Arles on September 3. He was 77.

The director was born Michel Boualem Dahmani in Algiers on September 10, 1948, to a Kabyle father and mother of Andalusian and Gitane origin.

He had a difficult childhood, growing up in poverty in slums on the outskirts of the Algerian capital, which he quit for France at age 14 in the early 1960s. After a period of precarity and petty criminality, a meeting with his idol, actor Michel Simon, opened the door to a dramatic arts course in Germain-en-Laye outside of Paris, after the latter wrote a letter of recommendation.

While gaining experience as an actor, Gatlif gradually started creating his own original work based on his own experiences and exploring the culture of his Roma origins.

He broke into directing in 1975 with La tête en Ruines, followed by the Spain-shot and set drama Corre Gitano, about a young gypsy man accused of a crime he did not commit. It was the first among a series of films exploring the culture and challenges of Europe’s Roma people.

In 1992, he won Cannes Un Certain Regard prize for Latcho Drom, a documentary about gypsy music.

He followed this with one of this best known films, Gadjo Dilo (The Crazy Stranger), starring Romain Duris as a Frenchman who travels to Romania in search of Roma singer, whose voice he has heard on tapes recorded by his late father.   The film premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1997 where it won the Silver Leopard.

Gatlif would go on to win Best Director in Cannes in 2004, with the autobiographical drama Exils, reuniting him with Duris and also featuring Lubna Azabal in the cast.

Subsequent works included Korkoro (2009), The Outraged (2012), Geronimo (2014), Djam (2017), Tom Medina (2021) and Ange (2025).