The Ocean Waif
1916"Let me see whether you're real flesh"
Alice Guy-Blache directed her first film in 1896 at Gaumont, making her arguably cinema's first-ever narrative filmmaker; by the time she made this film in 1916 she was running her own US studio, Solax. Only about 40 minutes of the original roughly 50-minute release survive, preserved by the Library of Congress with visible nitrate decomposition in places. It's her second film on this site alongside Falling Leaves (1912).