- guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2002 10.43 BST
"The film had been in a trunk in my father's house in Switzerland for years. They never bothered opening it, because the key was lost," said Ms Chaplin at a special screening. The trunk had belonged to her uncle Sydney, Chaplin's brother. He worked with the entertainer in vaudeville in England before the first world war, and later also with him in films such as the 1915 Giddy, Gay and Ticklish.
She said the pair then moved to the US. "After my mother died, we prised it open and found all this 16mm film. We thought it was just Uncle Syd's home movies, but it also includes footage shot during filming of The Great Dictator." The 10 minutes of silent film, shot on the set of the 1940 classic satire on Nazi Germany, shows a uniformed Chaplin waltzing in an ornate ballroom. It was screened at the Cannes film festival in southern France at the launch of the Charlie Chaplin Collection, digitally re-mastered versions of 18 Chaplin films on DVD.
The collection includes The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux, and The Great Dictator, and will be released in Britain in November. It includes family movies, many filmed by Sydney Chaplin, and backstage footage.
The French independent cinema chain MK2 will distribute the films with Warner Brothers Home Video.
Geraldine Chaplin herself made her film debut in her father's film Limelight, and in the biopic Chaplin she took the role of her grandmother.
