Korkoro
Tony Gatlif, a French-Romani-Algerian filmmaker, is best known for his films about the Romani people. His films explore themes of nationhood, identity and Romani culture, and include the landmark film Korkoro (2010). Born Michel Dahmani on 10 September 1948 in Algiers, Algeria, Gatlif moved to France in the early 1960s during the Algerian War. His mother was of Andalusian and Romani heritage, while his father was Berber. Gatlif has stated that he deeply identifies with Romani cultural identity, connecting the Roma experience of statelessness and displacement to broader narratives of exile and immigration in his films. Films such as Latcho Drom (1993), Gadja Dilo, Vengo and Korkoro integrate music and cultural resilience as central themes. His sincere engagement with community practices and beliefs is reflected in his beautiful cultural representations of Romani life, which contrast sharply with other cinematic portrayals of Romani people that often rely on stereotypes.
In Gatlif's most famous film Latcho Drom, he traces the migration of Romani people from India to Spain through a series of musical performances that capture the community across different geographies and generations. Importantly, Gatlif's culturally anchored storytelling avoids the fetishization of Roma music common in western art music. Instead of presenting an imagined "other," he offers an alternative historical narration that reveals how music and culture function in Roma oral histories, resistance, survival, and identity formation.
Gatlif's film Korkoro follows the same approach, emphasizing music and culture's role in community preservation through the Romani experience in Vichy France. Originally released as Liberté in French, Korkoro means "Freedom" in Romanes. The film follows a tight-knit Romani family struggling to preserve their traditions and way of life. Unlike many Holocaust films, Korkoro focuses primarily on the internal perspective—the community and family's priorities as they look outward—rather than centring on the rise of National Socialism, the impositions of the Vichy government, or the terrors of the Holocaust.
At the heart of the film is Taloche (played by James Thiérrée), a mentally fragile but spiritually vibrant Romani man whose childlike demeanor embodies his community's longing for freedom. One of the film's most emblematic scenes features Taloche sprinting barefoot through fields and forests with his arms outstretched like wings—a visceral expression of pure freedom that is both childlike and desperate. The score, Taloche's spirit, and the physicality of his running are all unbounded, representing total freedom and ultimately a community unrestricted by rising Vichy constraints. Along with his extended family, Taloche travels through the French countryside in caravans, practicing a centuries-old nomadic lifestyle deeply rooted in oral tradition, music, communal living, and spiritual connections to nature. These customs—ritual cleanliness, reverence for fire, and an aversion to settling in one place—are not merely cultural preferences but core aspects of Romani identity.
Their freedom becomes jeopardized when the Vichy government, under pressure from the Nazi regime, enforces laws making nomadism illegal through sedentarization policies. All itinerant people, including the Romani, must register and remain in fixed locations, leading to increased surveillance, harassment, and internment. The Vichy policies mirrored other anti-Romani campaigns of the Third Reich in Berlin, surrounding areas, and Austria. As an important historical note, the imposition of sedentarization on nomadic communities serves as a tool of genocide and famine beyond the Nazi system, including the Qazaks (1930-33), Native Americans and the reservation system in the US and Canada (1800s), Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-62), and recently Ethiopian sedentarization (1974-1991). The treatment of European Roma during the Holocaust represents a flashpoint within wider European colonialism. Therefore, arts and community resilience become important beyond representation—they are living epistemic knowledge practices that face eradication when people and communities are threatened.
The targeting of Romani culture during the Holocaust was as intentional and sadistic as the destruction of Jewish culture. At Treblinka, Sinti musicians were required to burn their instruments before being murdered. There were "Gypsy bands" at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen for SS entertainment, and the musical sadism of the Third Reich in manifesting tropes during Aktionen also extended to the Roma community. However, artistic tropes of Romani people persist problematically in western art music (Bizet's Carmen, Ravel's Tzigane, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies), making artistic responses to the Holocaust and Romani cultural eradication all the more important. Gatlif vividly portrays Romani customs, from spirited communal meals to the centrality of music played on traditional instruments like the cimbalom and violin, which serves as a vital expression of memory, identity, and resistance.
As the film continues, the family's arrival in a small village meets with a mix of curiosity and suspicion, but they receive support from a sympathetic French notary, Madame Lundi (Marie-Josée Croze), who understands the existential threat they face. The Romani, however, struggle to adapt to settled life, clashing intentionally with the strictures of the Vichy system. Taloche, in particular, resists any form of confinement—emblematic of a people whose cultural survival depends on movement, oral storytelling, and tight community bonds.
As the war progresses, the villagers and even Madame Lundi prove powerless to prevent the inevitable. The Romani family is rounded up and sent to an internment camp, where they are imprisoned without charge. This moment creates a striking effect in the score, again reflecting the inside-outside dynamic between family or community and external imposition. Their silence, broken only by minimal dialogue and music, emphasizes the trauma of state violence and the historical erasure of the Romani genocide. Similarly, the camp scenes focus on rituals and dignity rather than graphic violence. Silence and absence become poignant elements reflecting the real fates of Romani culture extinguished along with the community across Europe.
In the camp, even under brutal conditions, the family clings to their rituals and dignity. Gatlif does not depict large-scale atrocities directly but uses silence, absence, and symbolic imagery—such as Taloche's haunting final scenes—to evoke the horror and erasure inflicted on the Romani. In a haunting climax, Taloche returns to the woods and seemingly sacrifices himself, vanishing into the landscape. His fate remains ambiguous, but the emotional weight is clear: he chooses death or disappearance over life without freedom. This deeply symbolic moment captures resistance, loss, and the cost of freedom. The music fades with him, and the film ends on a mournful note, with Claude, a young French orphan who found solace among the Romani, left to carry their memory forward.
Korkoro is not just a historical drama; it is an urgent act of remembrance. By focusing on the lived experience and cultural richness of a persecuted people, Gatlif reclaims a silenced narrative and honors the Romani victims of the Holocaust with sensitivity, truth, and deep respect.
Korkoro uses traditional Romani music rather than an imagined pastiche created in classical music to celebrate the Romani people's rich cultural heritage. Gatlif incorporates instruments such as the violin, cimbalom, guitar, and accordion as living cultural practices representing communication and joy rather than artifacts or static items of remembrance. The music is often performed diegetically—played by the characters themselves around campfires or during communal gatherings—emphasizing music's role as an everyday, living tradition within the community.
In Korkoro, Tony Gatlif uses music and silence with precision and sensitivity, crafting a sonic landscape that honours the vitality and vulnerability of the Romani people. The music celebrates life, while silence mourns loss. Together, they create a haunting contrast that elevates the film from historical drama to a deeply felt requiem for a people and their endangered freedom.
Alexandra Birch, June 2025
Further reading
Baumann, Max Peter. "Music and Identity: Transformation and Negotiation." In Music and Minorities from Around the World: Research, Documentation and Interdisciplinary Study, edited by Ursula Hemetek, Essica Marks, and Adelaida Reyes, 33–52. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2004.
Gatlif, Tony, dir. Korkoro. Paris: Princes Films, 2009. DVD.
Gallery8. Roma Body Politics I: No Innocent Picture. Budapest: Gallery8, 2015. https://gallery8.org/en/news/2/73/roma-body-politics-i-no-innocent-picture.
Salo, Matt. "The Romani Gypsies and the Holocaust." Romani Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–25. doi.org/10.3828/rs.1994.1.
Silverman, Carol. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Silverman, Carol. “Persecution and Performance: Roma (Gypsies), Music, and Politics in the Balkans.” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 763–775. doi.org/10.1353/anq.2003.0043.