When a film opens up the crack that in us is closed by daily life and lets emotions enter, which is the same as saying lets emotions go out, we know that we are in the presence of a Chaplin’s work. Charles Chaplin knew the power of cinema and was aware of the emotional charge he had placed on “his” Kid. He knew the dust of the days that had covered up the existential cracks of childhoods spent in what today is conventionally called dysfunctional families. One hundred years have passed since the premiere of “The Kid”, and when we watch the film today and see the director’s body on the screen, what comes to the fore is essentially a question of the search for identity. “The Kid” is the becoming-child of all men, but it is simultaneously the atonement for all the failures of the adult world – whether material and social, or moral and celestial – that is to say, the reunion with belief and confidence that comes after the discovery of the deception that is cinema. (LL)