Damien Hauser revamps the tenets of Afrofuturism – a genre that centres Black history and culture and incorporates science-fiction, technology, and futuristic elements – by mixing indie filmmaking (low budgets, non-professional actors) with AI tools to create grandiose sceneries.
Hauser Film
Damien Hauser blends speculative sci-fi, mockumentary and romance in his Venice-premiered feature Memory of Princess Mumbi. Shot in Kenya with non-professional actors and improvised scenes, the film explores the ethical and creative tensions of using artificial intelligence in cinema, while embracing its imaginative potential.
Damien Hauser, 24, likes to make films quickly, joining the ranks of prolific festival luminaries such as the Romanian Radu Jude or South Korean, Hong Sang-soo.
With three other feature films and numerous shorts already under his belt, Hauser’s latest, Memory of Princess Mumbi, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, is a wild blend of speculative sci-fi, AI special effects, mockumentary and heartfelt romance. Swissinfo met him at the Lido to discuss his new film.
When it was revealed that director Brady Corbet used AI to lightly augment some scenes in his Oscar-nominated The Brutalist (2024), the resulting furore nearly derailed its awards campaign. Against this backdrop, many younger filmmakers are learning to shrug off those anxieties and embrace these tools with a sense of cautious optimism rather than fear.
Memory of Princess Mumbi stands as a striking example of that: a film made with open acknowledgment of the ethical implications of AI’s role yet one eager to act on its creative potential – and act quickly.
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“When I started making films at age seven, it was like playing a game,” Hauser tells Swissinfo after the Venice premiere. “Shooting a film in an hour, no script, just experimenting with friends. But eventually, things became more professional, and I made fewer films each year – so I didn’t do 20 per year, but three, and now one.” He looks a little sad as he says this, as if one feature a year is a pitifully small number.
Set in 2093, Memory of Princess Mumbi follows Kuve, a young filmmaker who travels with his friend Damién, played by the director, to the fictional African city of Umata, attempting to document the aftermath of a devastating war. There are widespread social movements to renounce the digital technologies that nearly destroyed humanity in the middle of the 21st century.
Damien Hauser pictured at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he presented his feature “After The Long Rains” (2023).
2023 Getty Images
Born in 2001 in Zurich, Swiss-Kenyan Damien Hauser has produced a prodigious variety of short films, music videos, plays, commercials, as well as four feature films: Blind Love (2021), Theo: A Conversation With Honesty (2022), After the Long Rains (2023), and now Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025).
Unlike many contemporary filmmakers, Hauser shoots when he has the inspiration and doesn’t get lost in the kind of development and funding webs that ensnare many young artists. With Princess Mumbi he takes this approach a step further, using AI to create the sci-fi special effects he requires.
Letting go
In auditioning female performers for the film-within-a-film, Kuve encounters Mumbi, a free-spirited local actress who is bound, he later finds out, to marry a prince. Kuwe and Mumbi fall in love, and she urges him to make the film without the use of artificial intelligence, but rather one more closely related to the expressed desires of the working people they meet along the way.
Despite this intricate sci-fi premise, Memory of Princess Mumbi was “very much improvised”, Hauser says, and shot through with this boundless spirit of invention. He travelled alone to Kenya with only a rough guide of what he had in mind. He enlisted the help of family friends and distant relatives, and he cast mostly non-professionals for the main roles.
“There was no formal script, but I wrote an elaborate 40-page outline – very nerdy, very specific about the world, the histories and mythologies.” He laughs thinking about it. He then explains how, as he began to watch the footage back, he realised he needed to put much of that aside and focus on the emotional core of the story.
A low-budget epic made possible by AI: “Memory of Princess Mumbi” was a great surprise at this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Hauser Film
“My younger brother passed away around the time I started to play around with these AI tools, which themselves led to this film. Maybe I wouldn’t have otherwise made it, but I needed to be distracted. After we got started, none of us worried too much on set about where we were going with it; it felt like just hanging out in front of the camera,” he says.
“When I was younger, I loved making fantasy films set in other worlds. Seeing what these [AI] tools could do – and with my visual effects background – I realised I could finally let my inner child out and make a film in these imagined worlds. Like the film, the post-production had to be improvised too – I had done some tests [of the AI special effects], but ultimately, they force you to improvise. If you want control, avoid AI when making films.”
The Kenyan setting and cast anchor the film in a tangible reality, and the approach to time in the village they shot in, “where it’s not possible to plan more than a day or two in advance”, meant total freedom. “This was only possible there. Back in Zurich, for example, [convincing my] friends to take a month off work is more difficult because life is more expensive and structured.”
‘Time capsule of the technology’
Hauser mainly uses AI to extend real-world sets and locations digitally in Memory of Princess Mumbi, blending filmed Kenyan environments with AI-generated backgrounds to create an epic, futuristic African backdrop. Like matte paintings in classic cinema, they give an artificial but powerful sense of scale.
“The film doesn’t pretend to be completely real,” he adds. “It’s a time capsule of the technology as it is when I made the film.”
Psychedelic, kitsch, futuristic…? Hauser doesn’t seem to bother with labels.
Hauser Film
In one scene, Mumbi herself suggests to the in-film filmmaker that all his AI-generated images should be clearly marked as such. “Honestly it’s incredibly important to acknowledge what’s AI-generated and what isn’t when you’re making use of these tools,” Hauser adds. “Today, it’s hard for people to know what’s real based on what they see online made from AI, and we should be responsible with the ways we include it [in our films].”
Coincidentally, Nairobi has become a major AI hub in Africa, but also a site where predatory tech companies can exploit cheap labour and an open market. Hauser smiles at the unexpected connection. “Well, I discovered a major problem when making this film; often, when I’d upscale my images, the AI would make my black characters white. It would remove their dreadlocks and bleach their skin. So that was disturbing and strange – but also oddly funny.”
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Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob/ts