Skip to main content

ABOUT

The Black Europe Film Festival (BEFF) is a celebration of Afro-European cinema, returning to the Twin Cities from February 19–22. Rooted in community collaboration and a commitment to inclusive storytelling, the festival showcases documentaries, narrative films, and shorts by today’s most compelling Afrodescendant filmmakers, with a special focus on Black European artists. BEFF provides a platform for filmmakers to share their work, build networks within the global Black diaspora, and connect with the international film community.

Black filmmakers bring a distinctive energy, creativity, and resilience to contemporary cinema. Their films reframe dominant narratives and challenge representations that have long marginalized and devalued Black lives across the globe. BEFF celebrates their work, with a programming that extend beyond the screen: masterclasses, conversations with visiting directors, film-production workshops, lectures, and artist residencies offer opportunities for deep engagement. The festival is an occasion of Black joy and a space where diverse audiences, communities, and young people can come together to learn, imagine, and experience transformative art.

Team

Fred Kudjo Kuwornu — Founding Director

Fred Kudjo Kuwornu is a Ghanaian Italian filmmaker, producer, civil rights activist, and educator. He is the founder of the independent production company DoTheRightFilms and is widely recognized for the award-winning documentaries Inside Buffalo (2010), 18 IUS SOLI (2011), and Blaxploitalian: 100 Years of Blackness in Italian Cinema (2016), which explore race, identity, and the politics of representation in Italy and Europe. Fred’s latest documentary, We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale of Art and is currently touring internationally. His work has been celebrated for advancing conversations around diversity, citizenship, and Black presence in European cultural history.

Lorenzo Fabbri — Founding Director and Curator

Lorenzo Fabbri is a professor, film curator, and producer based in Minneapolis and Rome. He teaches film and media at the University of Minnesota, where his work focuses on race, visual culture, and resistance. His most recent book, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon: Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy, examines the politics of film under Mussolini. In 2020, Lorenzo co-created At Home in Scott County, a student-directed documentary series commissioned by the Scott County Community Development Agency to amplify its mission and community voices. He is also a co-producer of Fred Kuwornu’s documentary We Were Here: The Untold Story of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe and is currently curating the edited volume The Cinema of the Global Black Diaspora in Europe, forthcoming in 2026.

Kirsten Smith – Festival Director

Kirsten Smith is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, film curator, and multilingual media studies scholar based in Minneapolis. She teaches French and media and culture courses at the University of Minnesota, and focuses on sociolinguistics, diasporic and Indigenous peoples and their representations, and anticolonialism. Her current book project focuses on the depictions of diasporic and Indigenous communities in the province of Québec’s cinema. Kirsten served as the Associate Curator for the 2025 iteration of the festival, and has previously contributed as a doctoral intern for film festivals and events in Montréal, Québec, Canada and as a translator for Tënk.ca’s catalogues on festival films. Kirsten is also currently co-editing The Cinema of the Global Black Diaspora in Europe with fellow BEFF team member and professor Dr. Lorenzo Fabbri, which will also feature fellow team member Iman Mohamoud. 

Iman Mohamoud – Outreach Director

Iman Mohamoud is an educator who is deeply passionate about culturally sustaining curriculums and the power of storytelling across the African and global diasporas. Based in Minneapolis–St. Paul, she serves as the Outreach Director for the Black Europe Film Festival, where she leads community partnerships, audience engagement, and public programming. Iman is a co-author of the forthcoming volume The Cinema of the Global Black Diaspora in Europe and is also contributing to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Cinema, where she is writing a section on the cinema of Somalia. As an educator, she developed the nation’s first high school Somali Literature English course, now sought after by districts across Minnesota. Iman also teaches leadership at the University of Minnesota and is committed to building film, arts, and educational spaces rooted in liberation, community, and belonging.

Arianna Lodeserto – Festival Manager

Arianna Lodeserto is an independent researcher, director, editor, and writer. She got a PhD in contemporary philosophy at Paris Sorbonne and studied documentary writing at ENS Louis-Lumière. Arianna writes essays and critical reviews for different journals and attended several international conferences and artist residencies (Bogliasco Center, Filmidee, Laguna Film Lab, Teatro India). Mixing and wandering among different media, she practiced photography, theatre, sound walking, archival reuse, and produced several experimental documentaries. Her short films Thirty-seven movies for a home, The houses we were, and The servant shepherd does not sleep at night, were screened at the Centre Pompidou, Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Locarno Festival, Triennale di Milano, but also in a hundred international festivals, receiving the Young Italian Authors Award, the Premio Cinemaitaliano, and several other awards for directing and editing.