09/05/2026
IN MEMORY OF TONY GATLIF
We remember Tony Gatlif on that evening of the Time for Peace Film & Music Awards in Paris, on December 10, 2010, when Korkoro (Liberté) received the Founder’s Choice Picture Award.
When we came to his table to congratulate him before presenting the award, he very kindly told us how wonderful he thought what we were doing was, and that cinema needed people like us.
Today, our thoughts are with his beloved wife and his family. We want them to know how close we feel to them at this painful moment, and that our love and thoughts accompany them.
Tony Gatlif was not only a great filmmaker. He was a man of profound humanity, culture and wisdom.
Goodbye, Tony. And who knows — perhaps we shall meet again one day, somewhere along the road, in the land of Gypsies.
Robert & Marion Einbeck
Cofoundars of the Time for Peace Film & Music Awards
INTRODUCTION OF TONY GATLIF — KORKORO (LIBERTY)
Founder’s Choice Picture Award — Time for Peace Film & Music Awards
Paris — Decembert 10, 2010
Since my earliest beginnings in the cinema, and even though the subject scared me, I felt the need to make a film on the Roma Holocaust. I would meet Roma who encouraged me by saying: “Make a film for us on the deportation of the Roma people.”
Early in 2007, some young Roma who were elected to participate with me in Strasbourg in an international colloquium on the Roma, made the same request. They pointed out how much their people had suffered, they spoke about the lack of recognition and the ignorance of other people about their history. Although I really wanted to, at the time I didn’t quite see yet how I would make that film. I am a filmmaker who loves the freedom of the camera and what mattered was respecting the rules of a rigorous reconstruction. Indeed, I was finding all sorts of ways to withdraw from shooting it for fear of rendering the reality poorly.
And then one day the trigger came. President Jacques Chirac was going to assemble the Righteous at the Pantheon to be honored. That was when I told myself the film was becoming possible, that we were finally going to find out whether certain citizens had saved the Gypsies. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even mentioned. And from that moment on I began to look for people who had saved families. I didn’t have enough elements available to make a documentary. People had died and I could only find very few archives. No one knew a living Righteous person who had saved any Roma. The latter feature was essential to me: to understand why a man or a woman had one day decided to save the Romany.
It was that lesson in humanity that I wanted to make into a film.
Most of all I didn’t want to condemn anyone, not even the police who had participated in the roundups. I just wanted to reveal, without exaggerating and without humiliating anyone.
The story speaks for itself and I needed to be sure that everything I showed was historically true.
— Tony Gatlif
