Tony Gatlif, whose real name is Boualem Michel Dahmani (in Arabic: بوعلام دحماني), was a French film director, screenwriter, composer, actor and producer. He was born on 10 September 1948 in Algeria and died on 2 September 2026 in Arles.

Tony Gatlif was born in a suburb of Algiers, then a French department, into a modest family of mixed origins: his father was Kabyle and his mother was a Roma woman of Andalusian origin. He spent his childhood in a slum area, between the streets and occasionally attending school, where he discovered cinema thanks to a teacher who projected films onto a stretched screen — an important experience that struck him and determined his profession. At the age of twelve he left home, settled in Algiers and worked as a shoeshine boy.

In the early 1960s, in the midst of the Algerian War and the struggle for independence, he moved to France, first ending up in slum areas and then in reform schools and hostels for young workers. His youth was marked by delinquency and wandering between Marseille and Paris, until in 1966 a fateful meeting with the actor Michel Simon prompted him to attend acting classes and begin a career in the theatre. It was during this period, during a police check, that he took the name Tony Gatlif, borrowed from a square in Algiers, while keeping his true identity — Boualem Michel Dahmani.

After taking part in several theatre productions and directing short films from 1973 onwards, Tony Gatlif made his feature-film debut in 1975 with La Tête en ruine, followed in 1979 by La Terre au ventre, telling the story of the Algerian War through the eyes of a pied-noir family. In the 1980s and 1990s his style became established in films such as Les Princes (1983), a portrait of settled Roma in the Paris suburbs, and then Latcho Drom (1993), a musical and visual epic about the Roma diaspora across Europe, which brought him international recognition. He confirmed this approach in The Exile (1997), in which he cast Romain Duris as a young Parisian who finds himself in a Roma camp, then in Vengo (2000) and especially in Exiles (2004), a coming-of-age film travelling between France and Algeria, which reunited him with his homeland. Throughout his career he also wrote music for his films, creating soundtracks combining Roma, Mediterranean and electronic motifs, and produced several of his own works.