Caroline Eades received her PhD in Film Studies from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, and is Associate Professor of Cinema and French Culture at the University of Maryland, USA. Her research interests include European cinema, post-colonial studies, Film feminist theory, and film and mythology. She is the co-editor of The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia (New-York: Wallflower, 2016) and the author of two monographs: Le Cinéma post-colonial français (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2006) and Cinéma et mythologie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021), as well as more than 50 book-chapters and scholarly articles on French cinema, culture, and literature.

This project intends to restore Habib Benglia’s place in the history of French cinema as the first actor of African origin. Born in 1895 in Algeria, he moved to Paris in 1912 and started an acting career in theater and cinema that lasted until 1960. In spite of the current effort in France to unearth forgotten black artists, Benglia’s contribution to cinema is little known by scholars and the general public. Eades research will be based on archival material on Benglia’s life and work and it will examine the prevalence of discrimination in film production and criticism during France’s colonial era until today.