LATEST LISTINGS:

Liverpool

We Were Here – the Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

Tuesday 13th October 2026

Ghanaian-Italian filmmaker Fred Kudjo Kuwornu comes to Bluecoat for a free screening of We Were Here – The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, a documentary challenging one of the most persistent myths about Europe’s past: that Black people were absent from Renaissance society except as servants or enslaved people.

The film examines the presence and contributions of Africans in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, drawing on paintings, archives and documented historical figures to recover lives that are visible in the historical record but frequently missing from popular accounts of the Renaissance.

Kuwornu’s approach begins with a deceptively simple question. When Black faces appear in celebrated European artworks, who were those people? How did they come to be in Italy, Spain, Portugal and other parts of Europe? What roles did they occupy, and what can their stories tell us about citizenship, culture and mobility in a period usually imagined as almost entirely white?

The result expands the story beyond servitude. The documentary brings attention to Africans and people of African descent who lived in Europe as artists, diplomats, scholars, religious figures and members of elite society, placing their presence within the broader movements of people and ideas that helped shape Renaissance Europe.

We Were Here was presented at the Central Pavilion of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and later became eligible for consideration in the 2026 Academy Awards documentary category. At Bluecoat, the 63-minute film will be introduced by Kuwornu and followed by a discussion and audience Q&A.

For Black History Month, this is an especially important event because it pushes Black European history much further back than the narratives many audiences first encounter through slavery, empire or twentieth-century migration. It demonstrates that Black presence within Europe is not an anomaly or recent development, but part of a much older and more complex history.

Presented in partnership with the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, the screening offers an opportunity to reconsider familiar European history through evidence that has often been left at the margins. Admission is free, but advance booking is required.

 

More Liverpool Listings MORE

Liverpool Saturday 19th September - Saturday 10th October 2026

DEATH OF A SALESMAN

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is reimagined for Liverpool by acclaimed British-Ghanaian theatre-maker Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu in a…

Liverpool Saturday 10th October 2026

Ibibio Sound Machine + Ziyad Al-samman

British-Nigerian frontwoman Eno Williams brings the electrifying Ibibio Sound Machine to Birkenhead for an October performance at Future…