Filmmaker-actor Carmen Chaplin is set to direct a theatrical documentary feature on her grandfather Charlie Chaplin. Titled “Charlie Chaplin, a Man of the World”, the film will shed light on a barely explored new facet to Chaplin, his Romani roots and heritage, reported Variety.
The film will be made in association with France’s MK2 which owns rights to Chaplin’s movies. Production starts in early 2020. This is the first time that the Chaplin family is involved at a deep creative and industrial level in a movie about the creator of the Tramp.
It is produced by Madrid-based Wave of Humanity’s Stany Coppet, Dolores Chaplin and Ashim Balla, Remirez at San Sebastian’s Kanaki Films and Nano Arrieta and Silvia Mart nez at Madrid’s Atlantic Pictures.
The documentary “radically reinterprets Chaplin’s oeuvre from a Romani perspective and examines the persecution of gypsies through his lens”.
“Determined to subvert audience expectations of a documentary on the silent film master, the storytellers envisage a dynamic fusion of animation, film excerpts, interviews with artists and Chaplin’s children, and cinema verite footage of Roma life today coming together to a soundtrack of new interpretations of Chaplin’s original compositions,” the filmmakers said.
Chaplin revealed in his autobiography that his parents were half-Romani. He did not have a birth certificate. He kept a letter, discovered in 2012 by daughter Victoria Chaplin, locked in his bedside table which he received late in life claiming that he was born in a Gypsy caravan at Black Patch Park in Smethwick, Staffordshire in the UK.