Charlie Chaplin "The Great Dictator"

Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator", his first sound film, is one of the great classics of film history, a brilliant satire on Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, but also on all forms of authoritarianism and the cult of the Führer. Equally famous are the invented gibberish of the "Führer", the dance scene of "Anton Hynkel" with the globe balloon and the Jewish barber's passionate appeal for democracy and justice at the end of the film. Both characters are played by Chaplin himself.

The Kulturraum Synagoge Lippstadt is showing the film as a prelude to a program focus on Roma and Sinti. While Chaplin was long wrongly considered a Jew and his films were therefore all banned in Nazi Germany, a letter turned up in his estate claiming that he was born in a caravan in a Roma camp in England. Two of his granddaughters made a movie about Chaplin's origins much later. His biographer Joyce Milton wrote: "I think the awareness of his Roma origins was an important part of Chaplin's identity and crucial to his art... I assume that Chaplin had Hitler's persecution of the 'Gypsies' very clearly in mind when he conceived the script for The Great Dictator."