Documentary Feature Focuses on the Romani Roots of Cinema Legend Charlie Chaplin

Director-writer Carmen Chaplin is directing Charlie Chaplin, A Man of the World, a theatrical documentary feature that adds a hardly-explored new facet to the creator of the Tramp, one of the most iconic cinema characters in popular consciousness, plumbing Chaplin’s Romani roots and heritage.

Marking the first time that the Chaplin family is involved at a deeply creative and industrial level in a movie about Charlie Chaplin, granddaughter Carmen Chaplin is also co-writing the documentary’s screenplay with Amaia Remirez, a co-writer and lead producer on Another Day of Life, a European Film Awards best-animated feature winner; and Isaki Lacuesta, twice awarded with Gold Shell in San Sebastian International Film Festival, a multi-awarded Spanish filmmaker whose work includes documentary, fiction, and video installations exhibited worldwide.

A documentary that “radically reinterprets Chaplin’s oeuvre from a Romani perspective and examines the persecution of Gypsies through his lens,” Charlie Chaplin, A Man of the World is produced by Madrid-based Wave of Humanity’s Stany Coppet, Dolores Chaplin, and Ashim Bhalla; Amaia Remirez at San Sebastian’s Kanaki Films; and Nano Arrieta at Madrid’s Atlantika Films.

Charlie Chaplin, A Man of the World is a feature-length cinema documentary focusing on the Gypsy roots of Charlie Chaplin, cinema legend, musician, and Romani. By exploring Charlie’s birth and childhood, foregrounding distinct Gypsy elements in his work, and by documenting Roma Gypsies, the movie offers a new and unique perspective on Charlie’s life and films as well as celebrating the vibrancy of Romani culture.

Following Charlie’s death in 1977, his daughter Victoria Chaplin discovered a letter addressed to her father which he had kept locked away in his bedside table for years. Michael Chaplin muses, “…my father received thousands of letters from all over the world, why would he keep that one unless it meant something to him? … And why was it a secret?”

The Romani author of the letter recounts the night Charlie Chaplin was born: not in London as widely believed but in a Gypsy camp in the English Midlands, “… you don’t know where you were born in fact or who you really are…” taunts Jack Hill.

Currently in production, the film is expected to be released later this year.