In their documentary film called “Charlie Chaplin. A Man of the World“, the sisters Carmen and Dolores Chaplin are investigating their grandfather’s Romani origin. Some of the first clips from the film were presented by them at the BCN Film Fest underway in Barcelona in 2021. This is the first time the Chaplin family has contributed to such a degree on a film about Charlin Chaplin, both as authors and producers. They say the documentary “radically reinterprets Chaplin’s work from a Romani perspective and, through that lens, investigates the persecution of the Roma.”
The documentary focuses on the Romani roots of film legend Charlie Chaplin, the circumstances of his birth and his childhood period, and how his Romipen affected his art. The film also offers a new, unique view of Chaplin’s life and films, as well as celebrating Romani culture.
In his autobiography, Chaplin himself made no secret of the fact that both his father and mother were themselves half-Romani. He never had a birth certificate but was said to have been born on 16 April 1889 in London, England.
After his death in 1977, a letter was found in his nightstand addressed to him by a Romani correspondent. It describes the night on which Chaplin is said to have been born at a Romani camp in a caravan in Black Patch Park, Smethwick in central-western England.
That letter was discovered by Chaplin’s daughter Victoria, and her brother Michael has reflected on it as follows: “My father received thousands of letters from all over the world. Why would he have kept that one if it didn’t mean something to him?”
“He was very well aware of his Romani roots and told my father and his other children about them. It was something he was proud of, but it was overlooked,” granddaughter Carmen Chaplin told Variety magazine at the San Sebastian film festival in 2019, where the sisters announced they were making their documentary.
Both sisters admit the idea to make the documentary came out of their “grandfather’s passion to find his Romani roots”, which he handed down to their own father, Michael Chaplin.
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