Synopsis

My Name is Michael.

I was born in California in 1946, only a few years before my father's exhil to Europe.

My father was Charles Chaplin.

As he often told his children, I always knew I was Gypsy.

Though, I never knew what this meant to him and even less how this background had impacted my father work.

However the recent discovery of a letter he had secretly kept locked away for years in his personal bedside table, brings a whole new light on his life and work.

This letter was sent to him a few years before he passed away. The author of the letter is an old Gypsy man called Jack Hill- a man who said he knew the true story of my father’s origins.

No one in my family knew anything about him or this letter, but what was written in it must have had some sort of importance to my father as, every night, until his death, he slept with it by his side. The circumstances of his birth always remained a mystery and it was a tremendous surprise for us to learn through this letter that he was probably born in 1889 near Birmingham, on a Romany site called Blackpatch, in the Caravan of a Gypsy queen, called Henty Sentinia. A piece of information that goes along with my father’s tells about the blood running in my veins…

This letter led me to investigate my family history and watch my father’s films with a brand-new eye. I now know that the character my father created: "The Tramp", was Romany Gypsy.

This documentary film, "The Caravan's Trail" is an inner journey into my family, a quest of my gypsy roots and a roadtrip I chose to follow inorder to share the untold story my father left for us as a silent legacy.