While European life and identity is often associated with whiteness, the Black Europe Film Festival is set to share a different set of experiences.
Screenings of various films from Thursday to Sunday in the Twin Cities will offer Minnesota audiences windows into Black European life – from historical presence to modern reality. Prior to the festival’s opening, I spoke with four directors about their films and what audiences can expect to see.
An untold history
While Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, founding director of the film festival, is an Italian filmmaker, his piece “We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe” focuses on an entire continent. The documentary examines the lives of historical Africans and people of African descent living or traveling through Renaissance Europe, including nobility, artists, a diplomat and a saint. This festival marks the film’s U.S. premier; its European debut having taken place during the 2024 Venice Biennale.
During the documentary, historical reenactments put actors in the roles of various Black figures during the Renaissance depicted in art, such as Duke Lorenzo de Medici and Juan de Pareja. Ninety percent of the historical reenactment cast, Kuwornu estimates, are migrants who attend a theater workshop in Bologna.
Related: Black Europe Film Festival debuts in Minneapolis
As migration from West Africa to Sicily involves traversing a desert and potentially working “as (a) slave for two (or) three months to repay the last mile of travel from Libya to Sicily,” the acting workshops provide a way for participants to familiarize themselves with the Italian language, along with an avenue to heal from their journeys to Italy, said Kuwornu.
“For me, (this film) is a way to challenge those who (claim) European roots in terms of whiteness (and) not in terms of continent,” said Kuwornu, whose father is from Ghana and whose mother is Italian. “I want to challenge (that and) say, ‘Yeah, you have European roots, but there are a lot of people who are not white that have the same.”
A healing journey
While Daniela Yohannes is quick to say she’s not a filmmaker, Julien Beramis, her partner and co-director, cheerfully contradicts her each time – “She is.”
Their short film, “Atopias: The Homeless Wanderer” is the second “Atopias” film the couple have made together. Yohannes, a painter whose series of paintings on diaspora and migration, “I Surrender My Body to Water and Fire” lent its colors to the film, said making the film was healing. Through the film, Yohannes was able to explore diasporic “tensions that (she felt) internally”, while also creating a space to “exist without boundaries (or) limitations.”
Filmed on the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, the work features Yohannes wandering through natural landscapes. She is covered in a mixture of cane sugar molasses and charcoal. This mixture – a pitch-black substance – was said to have been used by enslaved people as camouflage during escapes from slavery in the Caribbean. Yohannes said while a historian told Yohannes there was no record of this occurring, the way the tale has persisted in Caribbean culture indicates that the story is true “within the people.”
“The molasses felt like a shield,” said Yohannes, “Even though there’s hardship, by the end of filming, I felt I could just live out here (in nature) forever.”
A quiet rebellion
“Girl,” writer and director Adura Onashile said the film is “quietly subversive” in its focus.
“How far are we prepared to watch a Black woman do nothing (and) just be?,” said Onashile, who noted that there is a tendency to have Black characters’ on-screen and on-stage existences “justified by (their) trauma,” as though “suffering entitles them to be on screen.”
“Although there is trauma in this film, I started calling it halfway through the process of writing it a kind of meditation on (the) relationship (between mother and daughter),” said Onashile. “What I wanted to really hone in on was a kind of intimacy that is a world all of itself. It might be affected by trauma but isn’t necessarily solely defined by it.”
Set in Glasgow and focusing on the lives of single mother, Grace, and her daughter, Ama, the film is about the inevitable “growing up and growing apart” of a child from her mother. Onashile, who is based in Glasgow, is excited to be part of the film festival, noting that the United Kingdom does not have a festival with a particular focus on Black European filmmakers.
“Obviously, it goes without saying that Black European film is not a monolith,” added Onashile.
“What’s wonderful is that although we’ve all come together under the banner of this film festival, it’s so diverse. It’s important to remember that our stories are as diverse and as interesting and as dynamic as any other peoples’ making film.”
A program of screenings and director Q&As can be found here for the Black Europe Film Festival.
Deanna Pistono
Deanna Pistono is MinnPost’s Race & Health Equity fellow. Follow her on Twitter @deannapistono or email her at dpistono@minnpost.com.
