When the skies over Israel darkened with sirens last month, Italian-Ghanaian documentarist Fred Kudjo Kuwornu found himself crouched in a Tel Aviv shelter alongside international students and professors from Brazil, India, and Ethiopia. He was in Israel as a guest of the ERC FemSMed research project, which is held at Tel Aviv University.

“It was crazy,” he recalls now. “But it was an experience that made me reflect on how lucky I am, and how sometimes we don’t have real empathy for others until something happens to us, close up.”

For Kuwornu, whose life and work have long defied borders, those tense hours underground became just another unexpected chapter in a career devoted to shedding light on overlooked corners of history and the tangled roots that connect us all. His latest film, We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, is a vivid testament to that mission.