“Europe has a long history of Afrodescendant presence,” says Lorenzo Fabbri, co-founder of the Black Europe Film Festival of Minneapolis/Saint Paul. “And this presence is increasing.”
Hosted by various venues across Minneapolis this weekend, and offering nine features and 22 shorts, the BEFF MSP aims to showcase that presence while establishing a new cultural hub to bridge the local with the global.
Fabbri, a University of Minnesota professor, founded the festival with filmmaker and educator Fred Kudjo Kuwornu. They were inspired by the Black Italian Film Showcase, which Kuwornu curated in 2023. Both Fabbri and Kuwornu were determined to have the festival generate international connections.
“We really wanted to foster dialogue between the different aspects of the global black diaspora using cinema as a means or a tool to foster this important conversation about race, belonging, and community,” Fabbri says. Yet far too often, the stories about those topics are told by white filmmakers who, as Fabbri puts it, “employ a gaze or a style that sometimes is quite exploitative.”
To avoid this, Fabbri and Kuwornu sought to shape the festival’s identity through community partnerships and relationships. “I was really interested in using some of my community organizing background to meet people at a grassroots level for the festival,” says director of programming Sara Osman. “Our fear was that not doing it in this way, there would be a misalignment between our goals and what we actually are able to achieve,” Fabbri says.
In addition to working with the Main Cinema, Osman coordinated with the Cedar Cultural Center and the Capri Theater, community hubs that she says help form “the integral web of the city,” as well as the “institutional giant” Mia.
“We really wanted folks to rethink their relationship with institutions and museums that might seem inaccessible,” Osman says. “We really wanted people to rethink how they’re engaging in Minneapolis and feel ownership over these cities or these spaces and feel reinvigorated in 2025.”
Nearly every screening of the festival will incorporate Q+As, either virtual or in-person, providing a platform for directors whose films lack U.S. distribution. Through “conversation between filmmaker and the audience,” Kuwornu says, the festival hopes to provide “a different access to or perspective about Europe.”
The festival’s inaugural edition will highlight a range of genres, from science-fiction (The Gravity) to romantic comedy (The Black Sea) and coming-of-age drama (Girl). The festival also extends beyond the popular settings of Afrodescendant stories in France and the U.K. by featuring films set in Austria, Greece, and Ukraine.
Special focus will be given to the Somali diaspora, with a series of short films presented by the Qalanjo Project at the Cedar. As Fabbri explains, confining the festival’s selection process to stories based in national identity is “not a good framework to understand belonging” within diasporic communities.
By fostering curiosity in transnational identities, the BEFF MSP hopes to act as an empathetic corrective to the flagrantly nationalist rhetoric espoused by the far right.
“We want to have people think about how Blackness is being conceived in a modern-day time,” Osman says. “How our communities have built their roots deeply into European communities and states and nations. How are they thinking about their identities, not just as folks from the African continent, but this unique identity that has been formed by way of being a diasporic community that now is rooted?”
In the future, the festival team would like to expand its programming to include established filmmakers like Steve McQueen and Alice Diop. But for now, Fabbri says, they’re focused on “creating a visual archive of Black Europe today.”
Black Europe Film Festival of Minneapolis
Where: Capri Theater, Cedar Cultural Center, Main Cinema, Minneapolis Institute of Art
When: January 30-February 2
Tickets: Find complete showtimes and prices here
