Gatlif plays around with the stereotypes of Gypsies as many of his characters are engaged in the kind of low-level property crimes that many people tend to think of when they think about the "typical" Gypsy. His characters tend to be rootless, not as an intentional choice about a nomadic life but as the consequence of not having a place to call home. In some of this movies, such as Les Princes, he frames this low-level personal conflict against larger political conflicts. In this case, it is the Algerian War of Independence, the same international conflict that sent Gatlif himself as a young man from Algeria onto the streets of Paris.

Arguably all good film has some level of conflict as conflict is one of the main engines of both artistic and cinematic representations of the Rom, is that the conflicts he lets his audience see are framed as the kinds of emotional and psychological pushes and pulls that "ordinary" people suffer through.
His characters, whether seen as individuals alone or as individuals within the context of larger political agendas, are defined by conflict. But they are no better or worse than other people, and this for the Rom is highly unusual in terms of how they are presented to the larger world as people with a strong sense of self, a long history of oppression, and a very complicated sense of belonging.