Damien Hauser, a 24-year-old Kenyan-Swiss filmmaker, made his fourth feature, Memory of Princess Mumbi, by pairing live-action scenes shot in Kenya with backgrounds and effects generated by AI. The Nollywood Reporter profiled him on 30 September, as the film continues a theatrical run in East Africa after a festival year that took it from Venice to Toronto to Istanbul.
The 79-minute film is set in 2093 in Umata, an invented African kingdom where a war in the 2070s wiped out modern technology and old monarchies returned. A young documentary maker, Kuve (Abraham Joseph), arrives to film the aftermath and falls for Mumbi (Shandra Apondi), an actress already pledged to marry a prince (Samson Waithaka), who dares him to shoot his documentary without AI. The story mixes romance, mockumentary and science fiction, and turns its questions back on the tool that built its sets.
Its path so far: a premiere in the Giornate degli Autori (Venice Days) strand on 1 September 2025, the first Kenyan feature chosen for that section; a Toronto screening; and the Golden Tulip for best film at the Istanbul International Film Festival in April 2026. A homecoming screening at Prestige Cinema in Nairobi on 7 August opened a release through Bigger Motion in Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. Monument Releasing holds rights for the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand and opened it in US cinemas on 14 August.
Hauser started playing with AI image tools in 2023 and says they let him put on screen the kinds of worlds he had imagined since childhood, on a budget that science fiction normally cannot survive. He used them mainly for environments and effects, not to replace performers, and the joins sometimes show: the compositing is visible at points, which the profile treats as part of the look. Rather than neon futurism, the film leans on Kenyan landscapes, real locations and African cultural references.
He is open about the contradiction of setting out to make something AI could not make and relying on AI to do it. He calls the technology liberating but says the ethical questions left him uneasy, which is why the film argues with itself. One concrete problem he has described is AI tools altering how his Black actors looked, including lightening their skin. His position now is that he will keep working with real actors and human-written scripts, while expecting AI to transform visual effects.
The shoot came about six weeks after his 14-year-old brother, Charles Philip Hauser, died in a crash involving a stolen motorbike; he says he needed something to occupy him, and the grief in the film was not planned. He also tried to avoid conventional conflict, teasing confrontations that never arrive and lingering on ordinary moments between the characters instead. Editing ran about a year and a half, stretched by the visual effects; he normally works fast, found the wait a test of patience, and says the long stretch of recutting made the film stronger while teaching him why the storytelling rules he was dodging exist.
Hauser credits Venice with getting the film taken seriously enough to win a proper release at home, something his earlier features, which also travelled abroad, did not get. He started making films at seven, trained at the SAE Institute between 2016 and 2020 and now lives in Zurich; his earlier features are Blind Love, Theo: A Conversation With Honesty and After the Long Rains. He says he increasingly prefers small crews for the freedom they allow, while admitting that bigger productions, where more money is at stake and experiments are harder, are more sustainable as a career, and he can see himself doing both.
The film is dedicated to his brother, with the dedication near the end. Hauser does not present it as a cure for grief or claim it changed how he mourned; he says it gave him something meaningful to work on, and that he believes in holding on to beautiful moments when life is hard, which is what the finished film is about.
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