There are moments in a project when everything clicks. When strangers become collaborators, when a camera becomes a bridge, and when the simple act of spending time together across languages and generations starts to feel like something bigger than a training week. The Premieres of Diversity training in Rome was one of those moments — and at the heart of it, a shared purpose: giving voice to Ethiopian diaspora communities across Europe.

Over four days, 35+ young people and youth educators from six countries — Italy, Malta, Belgium, Greece, Austria, and France — came together not just to learn, but to build something: a shared language of media, storytelling, and belonging. Many among them carry the experience of diaspora firsthand. Others came as allies, educators, and co-creators. All of them arrived in Rome knowing that the stories they are about to tell matter.

The week wasn’t designed to be linear, and it didn’t feel that way either. Yes, there were technical sessions on video production — formats, tools, quality, the craft of making something worth watching. But what gave those sessions meaning was what happened around them. Meals shared, conversations that spilled into the evening, spontaneous connections between people who had never met and who came from entirely different walks of life. When learners hang out together, they form a community — and that community is what makes the work possible. For young people navigating questions of identity, roots, and belonging across borders, that sense of community is not a side effect. It is the point.

One of the most memorable days took the group out of the city entirely, to Frascati — a place that carries its own unexpected thread of Ethiopian history, though not an uncomplicated one. It was here that Cardinal Guglielmo Massaia, known in Ethiopia as Abuna Messias, spent the final years of his life, writing his memoirs of thirty-five years of Catholic mission among the Oromo people. His legacy still lives in the town, in an Ethiopian Museum that bears his name — a collection of artefacts and documentation gathered by a European missionary, telling Ethiopian stories through a European gaze. Decades after his death, the Italian fascist regime would attempt to recast him as a symbolic precursor to the colonial occupation of Ethiopia, a distortion he could never have authorised but that reveals how easily others’ narratives get written over a people’s own history. Working in teams across different video formats — interviews, backstage footage, reportage — the young participants of Premieres of Diversity used the extraordinary environments of the monastery as both backdrop and inspiration. Perhaps without knowing it, they were doing something quietly radical in a place like this: learning to tell Ethiopian stories themselves, in their own voice, on their own terms.

By the final day, something had shifted. Participants who had arrived as newcomers to the process were already experimenting with confidence — and that confidence, built through doing rather than just listening, is exactly the foundation the next phase will need.

Because what comes next is no small thing. The teams are now heading back to their cities — Rome, Malta, Vienna, Bordeaux, Brussels, Athens — to produce videos that will narrate, celebrate, and document Ethiopian diaspora life in each of these communities. These are not training exercises. They are acts of memory, visibility, and pride. Stories that deserve to be told, by the people best placed to tell them.

Rome was the beginning. The work — the real, meaningful work — starts now.