When Tony Gatlif comes to mind, what emerges first is not a particular cinematic genre but a world of his own. Romani melodies, roads, borders, people on the move, crowded tables, streets and characters who never quite fit anywhere… In his films, these are not independent elements. They are all fragments of a world in which the feeling of belonging is constantly questioned.

At the heart of Gatlif’s cinema lies Romani culture. Yet his films do not simply observe this culture from the outside or reduce it to a folkloric image or an exotic narrative. In exploring Romani music, dance, everyday life and history, he pursues a broader question: How can a person exist beyond an identity assigned to them by others?

Born Michel Dahmani in Algeria on 10 September 1948, Gatlif was the son of a Kabyle father and a Romani mother. He spent his childhood in Algeria and moved to France at a young age. The violence, poverty, displacement and sense of foreignness he encountered in his early life would later become central concerns of his cinema.

Yet Gatlif’s story was never limited to his own past. Drawing on his experiences, he turned toward the world of those pushed to the margins of society, those forced beyond borders, and those living between belonging somewhere and belonging nowhere completely.

For this reason, the “other” in his films is not simply a concept describing a particular community. It is also a perspective that questions whom society leaves outside and from what distance people look at one another.

Gatlif did not treat Roma, migrants, exiles and displaced people merely as characters to be represented. He also carried the rhythm, sound and everyday life of their worlds into the form of his cinema. The movement of his camera, following the rhythm of streets and bodies, is part of this approach. In his films, the camera rarely observes characters from a distance; it moves with them and participates in the life surrounding them.

And then there is music…

In Gatlif’s cinema, music is not simply a soundtrack standing behind the image. Romani melodies, flamenco, rebetiko and the sounds of North Africa become direct parts of the story. At times, music carries emotions that characters cannot express; at others, it makes the memory of a community visible. When words are insufficient, music moves to the forefront of the narrative.

Yet the central role of music is also one of the most debated aspects of Gatlif’s cinema. His use of music, dance and movement to make Romani culture visible brings its memory and voice to the centre of cinema; on the other hand, it has also been criticised for potentially softening experiences such as poverty, discrimination, migration and exclusion within an aesthetic atmosphere. When pain is made beautiful through music and dance, the audience may perceive the reality before them not as it is, but as a romantic or exotic experience.

From this perspective, Gatlif’s cinema exists on a fine line between making the other visible and exoticising them. His attempt to portray Romani life through its own cultural elements can be read as an effort to move beyond viewing Roma simply as a community observed from the outside. Yet this world is ultimately still seen through the director’s camera. His films therefore make Romani stories visible while also raising the question of whose perspective shapes those stories.

This tension becomes particularly clear in his use of music. For Gatlif, music is not a background element but a narrative form in its own right, carrying the memory of characters and communities. For this reason, the fact that music sometimes takes precedence over cinematic narration cannot simply be considered a weakness; it can also be read as a deliberate aesthetic choice. Yet this choice leaves open the question of when music remains the voice of a culture and when it becomes an aesthetic spectacle for the audience.

The 1993 film Latcho Drom is one of the strongest examples of this cinematic approach. The film traces the cultural journey of the Roma from India to Europe through music, dance and images rather than dialogue. Geographies change, languages and faces change; yet cultural memory continues its journey through music.

This is also where a fundamental distinction in Gatlif’s approach to Romani culture emerges. He attempts to portray Roma not simply as an “other” observed from the outside, but as part of a living culture with its own memory, language, music and everyday life. Yet this approach does not completely eliminate the possibility of exoticisation. On the contrary, it makes the question of when making a culture visible can turn it into an aesthetic object even more important.

One of the strongest examples of this approach is the 1997 film Gadjo Dilo. Through the story of a young French man who arrives in a Romani community in Romania, the film explores foreignness, cultural distance and encounter. The “gadjo” at the centre of the film, meaning a non-Romani outsider, tries to understand a community while also confronting his own prejudices.

Here, Gatlif does not simply tell the story of a community. He also questions the audience’s gaze. The person attempting to understand the other is eventually forced to recognise their own position and prejudices. Yet questioning the audience’s gaze also requires questioning the director’s own gaze. Approaching another culture does not make the camera of the person representing it invisible.

Vengo, released in 2000, is one of the films in which the director turns toward the world of Andalusia and flamenco. Bringing death, mourning, family and revenge together with music and dance, the film does not use flamenco merely as a cultural spectacle. The movement of the body becomes an expression of emotions suppressed by the characters.

Exils, released in 2004, is one of the films more directly connected to Gatlif’s own past. The story of two young people travelling from Paris to Algeria explores the idea of return. Yet this return is not simply a desire to go home. Sometimes a person moves toward a feeling of belonging not to the place where they were born, but to a past they have never known.

Throughout this journey, Gatlif’s camera follows not only geography but memory. Exploring the relationship between identity and place of birth, Exils earned the director the Best Director Award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

Gatlif’s cinema looks not only at the people of today but also at those whose stories have not been sufficiently told by history.

His 2009 film Liberté tells the story of Roma subjected to Nazi persecution during the Second World War. The film focuses on a part of European history that remained insufficiently visible for a long time and places the persecution of Roma within historical memory. Here, Gatlif uses cinema not only as a form of storytelling but also as a space for making forgotten or marginalised stories visible again.

Yet making historical pain visible is only one part of the issue; how that pain is represented is equally important. Aestheticising suffering can bring it closer to the audience, but it can also soften the harshness of the reality itself. One of the tensions within Gatlif’s cinema emerges precisely here: at the boundary between making suffering visible and making it beautiful.

Djam, released in 2017, moves Gatlif’s world from Greece to Istanbul. Accompanied by rebetiko, the film intertwines the sea, cities and roads with feelings of loss, freedom and solidarity. Istanbul becomes not so much a final destination as a space where different cultures come into contact.

Because in Gatlif’s films, the road is not merely a form of geographical movement. As characters travel from one place to another, they carry their pasts with them. Journeying is therefore both a geographical and a personal experience in his cinema.

Leaving a place does not mean escaping the past. On the contrary, it often brings a person face to face with that past once again.

Tony Gatlif died at the age of 77 while working on a historical film project in Arles, following a health problem. He left behind a long cinematic career stretching from 1975 to 2025 and a filmography of 25 feature films. His final film, Ange, was released in 2025.

Yet remembering Gatlif only as a director who portrayed Roma would narrow the scope of his cinema. He began with Romani culture, but his deeper concern was the right of a person to define themselves.

Who decides who a person is?

States? Borders? Documents? Places of birth?

Gatlif’s films do not offer a single answer to these questions. Instead, they suggest that identity is not a fixed and unchanging definition. Memory, language, music, the body, the past and personal experience are also parts of the way a person constructs themselves.

There are borders in his cinema, but borders are never the final word.

Maps can divide countries. Documents can classify identities. Societies can create distinctions between “us” and “them”. Gatlif places music, movement and human stories against all these divisions. Yet music and movement are not neutral either; they too pass through a particular gaze.

Perhaps this contradiction is precisely what makes his cinema lasting. Gatlif does not try to erase differences; he makes them visible. Yet the act of making something visible is itself open to debate. Telling the story of a culture does not necessarily mean understanding it; representing suffering aesthetically does not always convey the full weight of that suffering to the audience.

From Romani melodies to flamenco, from rebetiko to the sounds of North Africa, his cinema portrays cultures not as isolated worlds but as lives that come into contact with and transform one another. In this sense, Gatlif’s cinema opens a powerful space for imagining different forms of coexistence. At the same time, it forces us to consider who represents these differences, how they are represented and through which aesthetic tools.

What remains after Tony Gatlif is not only the work of one of the strong representatives of Romani culture in cinema. What remains is also a powerful cinematic language built around identity, migration, belonging and borders, carried by music and movement.

In his cinema, what matters is not only where the journey leads, but what is remembered along the way and how that journey is seen.

Hope consists of expectations greater than zero regarding the fulfilment of a future goal (Rideout and Montemuro, 1986). Its most important characteristic is the belief that there is a way out and that, with help, changes can occur in an individual’s existence.

Despair, on the other hand, is defined as negative expectations, below zero, regarding the fulfilment of a goal. Both hope and despair are possible reflections of a person’s chances of attaining their actual goals in the future (Melges, 1969). Hope and despair represent opposing expectations.

While hope involves the anticipation that the plans put into action to achieve a goal will succeed, despair involves a judgement of failure. These two opposing expectations vary from person to person and from situation to situation, depending on when and how the expected outcome is expected to occur.

Each of these plans and expectations affects not only how an individual fits their plans to their goal, but also the form of the goal they establish for themselves. The individual processes this way of thinking through the following stages (Melges, 1969).

Ability versus chance: An individual may achieve their goals through ability or through chance. People who believe that their future depends on chance are less inclined toward goal-oriented behaviour. Moreover, a person’s belief that their plans are ineffective creates a sense of inadequacy. Belief in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of action, together with a person’s self-respect and belief in their own ability, is a key factor in determining feelings of despair.

Trust versus distrust: The trust one feels toward others plays an important role in the development of hope. When considered in terms of dependence on others, the intensity of a person’s distrust toward other people limits their goals. When an action undertaken together with others ends in failure, a person who lacks a sense of trust tends to hold others responsible. A person with a developed sense of trust, however, accepts partial responsibility for an unsuccessful outcome.

For this reason, a distrustful person tends to prefer short-term goals rather than long-term ones.

Long-term versus short-term: Hope determines goals that can be achieved in the short term, the long term, or both. The extension of time may begin to coincide with despair. Thus, even if a person waits for the outcome in a fatalistic manner, they continue to make an effort toward short-term goals.

In summary, the interaction between ability and chance on the path toward achieving a goal, one’s sense of trust in others, one’s belief in the effort required to achieve short-term goals in comparison with persistent and long-term goals, and the interaction among these beliefs largely determine the forms of hope or despair experienced by an individual.

WHO IS INGMAR BERGMAN?

Ingmar Bergman was born on 14 July 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin (née Åkerblom), a nurse who was also of Walloon descent.

The Bergman family came from Järvsö in Gävleborg. Bergman’s paternal grandfather worked as a pharmacist in Stockholm, while his great-great-grandfather Henrik Bergman worked as an assistant pastor and married Erika Augusta Agrell, the daughter of pastor Erik Agrell, and Elsa Margareta Hermanni, the daughter of chief accountant Hieronymus Emanuel Hermanni, as well as Anna Katarina Neostadia. The Hermanni family were merchants in Stockholm, while Hieronymus’s father, Simon Daniel, was a wholesaler like his grandfather.

Through Elsa Margareta Hermanni, Bergman was descended from the Swedish noble families Bröms, Stockenström and Ehrensköld, as well as clerical families of Swedish and Swedish-Finnish origin and urban families of Swedish and German origin. Through his paternal grandmother, Anna Katarina Eneroth, Bergman was descended from German noble families. The Flach and de Frese families had been introduced into the Swedish Riddarhuset.

Anna Katarina Eneroth was the cousin of Johan Åkerblom, Bergman’s maternal grandfather, who worked as a traffic director. Thus, Bergman’s parents were second cousins. His maternal grandmother, Anna Calwagen, was the daughter of the German and English lecturer Ernst Gottfrid Calwagen and his wife Charlotta Margareta Carlsberg. The ancestor of the Calwagen family, the merchant Paul Calwagen, had migrated from the Netherlands to Karlshamn, Sweden, in the seventeenth century.

Paul’s wife, Maria van der Hagen, of Dutch-Swedish descent, was descended from the Dutch-Swedish court painter Laurens van der Plas. Through Ernst Gottfrid, Bergman was descended from the noble families Tigerschiöld and Weinholz, as well as the Bure family.

WHAT IS DESPAIR ACCORDING TO INGMAR BERGMAN?

“I came out of the cinema reeling as if drunk, in a state as though I were speechless from drugs, while the film pumped through my bloodstream at a rapid pace.” Gunnel Lindblom, the star of The Silence, described her first experience in a Bergman film in 1949.

Ingmar Bergman’s mature cinema creates an intimate interaction with the viewer in which a series of disturbing emotions emerge and are shared, often taking place face to face. Bergman’s groundbreaking 1966 film Persona provides an example of such an encounter. The film’s original title was Cinematographe, the Swedish term for cinematography.

Yet both names are appropriate for a work that questions cinema and the subject through an effective but disturbing ontological collapse. This can perhaps be seen most clearly in Bergman’s extraordinary use of close-ups, which Gilles Deleuze described as forcing the human face into an encounter with emptiness.

The relentless close-up of the face is a formal and thematic key to Bergman’s work. In these frequent, almost embarrassingly intimate and fully extended moments, the viewer can see, contemplate and feel existential securities in various states of crisis, while watching the faces before us reduced to bare flesh, bone, mouth, nose, hair and eyes.

This finely focused dissection forces us to confront both the mysterious materiality of the face and its role as the communicative nerve centre of an individual’s investment in subjectivity. The camera moves anxiously, almost as if attempting to enter, until the enormous, isolated face fills the frame and brings the zoom to a halt.

As we watch our enormous diegetic companion ask what it is that they are, confronting a personal void, the viewer encounters a vast human world that is at once close and alienating.

Here, a doubled gaze takes place: the self-consciousness of the subject on screen as it confronts crisis meets the viewer’s gaze, incorporated into and participating in the image. Both the face and the viewer seem to experience the intensity of the gaze as diegetic and metadiegetic perspectives intermingle and fragment.

This is reinforced by Bergman’s frequent use of the 1.33:1 frame, which excludes any clear view of the world beyond the face, leaving it with no obvious direction—up, down, left or right—in which to direct its gaze.

The face trapped within the relentless close-up seems to search beyond the dimensions of the frame, opening a black-hole-like space immune to cinematic existence. Enclosed on all four sides, the face looks toward a direction not confined by the graphic dimensions of the screen, toward a space that is something far greater than a black hole.

In this final movement, in which the enormous face looks directly out of the screen and visually explores a world beyond the world in which it conventionally exists, the field of the diegetic subject becomes connected to my own.

(Here I am, sitting in this disturbingly intimate experience, disturbed by it and yet simultaneously exhilarated.)

THE PLOT OF PERSONA

Persona is a 1966 Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The story revolves around Alma (Andersson), a young nurse, and her patient, the celebrated theatre actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who suddenly stops speaking. They move to a cottage where Alma begins to look after Elisabet, trust her, and gradually finds it difficult to distinguish herself from her patient.

Characterised by elements of psychological horror, Persona has been the subject of extensive critical analysis, interpretation and debate. The film’s exploration of duality, madness and personal identity has been understood as reflecting Jung’s theory of personality, while the filmmaking has been interpreted in relation to vampirism, homosexuality, motherhood, abortion and other themes. Its experimental prologue and narrative style have also attracted considerable attention.

The enigmatic film has been called the Everest of cinematic analysis. According to film historian Peter Cowie, “Everything said about Persona can be challenged; the opposite can also be true.”

Bergman developed Persona together with Ullmann and Andersson around the idea of its protagonists and their exploration of identity. The film was shot in Stockholm and Fårö in 1965. During production, the filmmakers experimented with effects involving smoke and mirrors to frame a scene and, in post-production, combined the faces of the principal characters for a single shot. Andersson defended an explicit monologue in the script and rewrote parts of it.

When Persona was first released, it was edited because of its controversial subject matter. It received positive reviews, and the term Person(a)kult was coined by the Swedish press to describe its enthusiastic followers. The film won Best Film at the 4th Guldbagge Awards and was nominated by Sweden for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The censored material was restored in 2001.

Many critics consider Persona one of the greatest films ever made. It ranked fifth in Sight & Sound’s 1972 poll and seventeenth in the 2012 poll. It has also influenced subsequent directors, including Robert Altman and David Lynch.

ANALYSIS OF PERSONA

The title Persona reflects the Latin word for “mask” and Carl Jung’s theory of the persona, an external identity distinct from the psyche. Jung believed that people project public images in order to protect themselves and may come to identify with those personalities.

An interviewer asked Bergman about the Jungian implications of the film’s title. Bergman accepted the alternative interpretation that it referred to the masks worn by actors in ancient drama, while also acknowledging that Jung’s concept corresponded to the film “admirably.” Bergman agreed that Jung’s theory “fit the situation well.”

Elisabet is a theatre actress and is seen in “mask-like makeup,” which, according to Singer, points toward a “theatrical personality.” Singer notes that Elisabet wears “thick and artificial eyelashes” even when she is not performing.

Egil Törnqvist observed that, while performing as Electra, Elisabet turns her eyes away from the theatre audience and breaks the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera. According to Törnqvist, she makes a fist, symbolising her rebellion against the concept of meaningful performance. Singer concludes that although Elisabet develops a deeply personal relationship with Alma, she cannot escape her identity as an actress and is ultimately left alone with the “desperate dream of being.”

The photograph of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire, as described by Carsten Jensen, was identified by journalist Malcolm Browne as being connected to the themes of Persona.

According to Singer, Bergman confronts his audience with “the nature of the art form.” Literary critic Maria Bergom-Larsson wrote that Persona reflects Bergman’s approach to filmmaking.

Although Alma initially believes that artists are “created out of compassion, out of the need to help,” she sees Elisabet laughing at performances on a radio programme and realises that she herself has become the subject of the actress’s work. She rejects her earlier belief: “How foolish I am.” While Elisabet examines Alma, Bergman examines them both.

Michaels wrote that Bergman and Elisabet share a dilemma: neither can respond authentically to “great catastrophes” such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. Political columnist Carsten Jensen identified the images Elisabet sees from Vietnam as those of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire in 1963.

According to Jensen, photographs of Quảng Đức’s death were widely circulated and were used in Persona. Scholar Benton Meadows wrote that Elisabet sees herself in Quảng Đức’s death and fears that this will be the consequence of her silent rebellion.

Törnqvist wrote that Elisabet was affected by the fact that the monk was a genuine rebel, while her own rebellion amounted to a cowardly retreat behind a silent persona.

Coates also associated masks with the themes of identity and duality: “The mask is Janus-faced.” Alma’s secret emerges in the sex-party monologue, which critic Robin Wood connected to a combination of shame and nostalgia, perhaps indicating the character’s sexual disintegration. According to Wood, the incident touches upon infidelity and childhood sexuality.

Arnold Weinstein wrote that Alma’s story provides the harshest example of the “cracks” in the character’s mask. She believes in her identity as a nurse, ultimately leading to the “collapse of the self.” The monologue is so intense that it approaches pornography.

Film historian P. Adams Sitney summarised the story’s trajectory as a psychoanalytic process: a referral, followed by an initial interview, explanations and the discovery of the patient’s fundamental problem. According to Sitney, the story initially appears to begin from Alma’s point of view; after Elisabet compares their hands, however, her perspective emerges as the source of the story.

Another possible reference to psychology is the play Elisabet performs when she becomes mute: Electra by Sophocles or Euripides. According to Bergman, he did not focus on Greek tragedy in his work, but the character of Electra inspired the idea of the Electra complex. Bergman felt that his choice of the play was connected to “sexual identities,” a key concept in psychoanalysis.

The theme of gender also fits Bergman’s recurring motif of “fighting women,” previously seen in The Silence and later in Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata. According to Professor Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Elisabet’s resistance to speaking can be interpreted as a resistance to gender roles. By portraying this tension primarily through women, Bergman can be said to “problematise the position of woman as the other”; the role imposed on women by society is “essentially alien to their subjecthood.”

Blackwell also wrote that the attraction between Elisabet and Alma, together with the absence of male sexuality, is consistent with their identification with one another and creates a doubling that reveals a “multiple, fluid, self-contradictory identity”—a concept of identity that undermines male ideology.

The theme of merging and doubling surfaces early in the film when Alma says that she has watched one of Elisabet’s films and is disturbed by the thought that they resemble one another. Blackwell also suggests that one of the film’s original titles, A Piece of Cinematography, may imply the nature of representation.

She also draws attention to the film’s fabricated tones. Alison Darren describes Alma and Elisabet’s relationship as existing “somewhere between love and hate” and profiles Persona in The Lesbian Film Guide, suggesting that, “although it may easily be an illusion,” the two women may approach having sex in one scene. Viewing the scene in which Elisabet enters Alma’s room as seductive, she interprets the film in feminist terms as a depiction of lesbianism.

Professor Alexis Luko felt that the characters’ touches and similarities on screen symbolise the merging of their personalities while also conveying intimacy and eroticism.

Foster believed that Elisabet’s gaze leads her to question Alma about her engagement to Karl-Henrik. According to Foster, sexual encounters between men and women are associated with abortion, while lesbian love increasingly becomes associated with a shared identity.

However, if Persona dramatizes a lesbian relationship, this is clearly not presented in a positive light, as it later becomes characterized by narcissism and violence. If lesbianism is regarded as a stronger version of female friendship or maternal love, Alma and Elisabet’s relationship takes the place of the depiction of the Oedipus complex in the prologue, in which the male child reaches out in vain toward his mother. According to Jeremi Szaniawski, the homoeroticism (gay and lesbian) in Bergman’s Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, and Face to Face constituted a rebellion against the strict upbringing imposed by Bergman’s father, Erik Bergman, a minister of the Church of Sweden.