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,
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