Documentary explores lesser-known history of Africans in Europe

Spanish, French, Italian, English and more voices filled a room in Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall at the University of Maryland on Thursday.

These voices weren’t from the over 50 people in the room, but from the documentary “We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe.”

Directed by Italian filmmaker Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, the documentary discusses the history of African people in Renaissance Europe through art.

Kuwornu said he wanted to make a documentary for high school or university students that would interest them in the topic, rather than be boring like history classes can be.

“Art history has a huge potential to be interesting for a lot of people that are interested in different topics,” Kuwornu said.

Kuwornu was born in 1971 in Italy to a Ghanaian father and an Italian mother. Much of his work has explored Black and African representation and multiculturalism, according to his production company, Do the Right Films’ website. He’s directed films such as Blaxploitalian, another “hidden stories” film that explores the work of Black actors in Italian cinema, according to Do the Right Films.

Kuwornu traveled all over Europe, including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France, to make “We Were Here,” which was released in April 2024 and had a theatrical release in January 2025. 

“This was a process that I started to do by myself, traveling around those countries,” Kuwornu said. “I also decided to shoot myself. So technically it was easy and not easy, because being alone, sometimes I was also scared that somebody could steal my camera or somebody could watch me and ask why I was there.”

During the hour-long documentary experts spoke about the African and Black presence and impacts in Europe as art. There were reenactments of influential Black artists, servants, aristocrats and more from Renaissance Europe. Artists like Juan de Pareja and Alessandro de’ Medici of the famous and influential Medici family were just some of the historical figures in the documentary. 

Trokon Anderson, a junior studio art major said it was interesting to learn about a less white-focused view of the Renaissance.

“I think erasure isn’t always the right word,” Anderson said. “It’s more so what was taken out of focus, right? Because the film led me to see… there were actually Black people who were revered in Europe.”

Hannah Wegmann, one of the event’s organizers and the undergraduate advisor for French, said the event was organized by this university’s Department of French and Italian, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Language House and the larger School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

The event was organized to celebrate Black History Month in a way that aligned with the school’s international focus, Wegmann said.

“There were so many different languages, and I loved knowing that every time a language was being spoken, there were a handful of people in this room that study it,” said Wegmann. “So I thought that was really cool for our students, too. We had students from Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, other languages… in the room, and to have all different representations of different languages in this larger conversation about representation of different races.”

Miguel Valerio, an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese who helped organize the event, said the documentary helps expand what we understand about the Renaissance.

“Here’s a documentary that shows the large presence of Black people in Europe that tells a different story, because they were not all enslaved,” Valerio said. “They held different positions in European society at the time and it broadens the narrative of what we understand about the history of Black people in our time.”