‘Memory of Princess Mumbi’ Director Damien Hauser on Using AI to Make a Movie That ‘AI Could Never Make’

If AI is coming for filmmakers, don’t tell that to director Damien Hauser.

In his latest feature, “Memory of Princess Mumbi,” which premieres in the Venice Days sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, the young Swiss Kenyan filmmaker imagines a retro-futuristic Africa set in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war, creating a rich visual tapestry that makes ample use of artificial intelligence.

The result — a playful, bittersweet meta-fiction that is part love story, part mockumentary — is a film that Hauser readily admits he could have never made without AI, even as he set out to “make a movie that AI could never make,” the director tells Variety.

“Memory of Princess Mumbi” is set in 2093, as a young documentary filmmaker, Kuve (Abraham Joseph), travels to the kingdom of Umata to document the aftermath of the great war. There he meets Mumbi (Shandra Apondi), a free-spirited actress who challenges him to make his movie without using AI. What begins as a playful debate about the relationship between art, creativity and technology soon leads to an ill-fated romance, culminating in the young princess’ tragic death.

“Memory of Princess Mumbi” is produced by Out of My Mind Films in co-production with Hauserfilm. It’s produced by Hauser and co-produced by Kaleem Aftab and Shandra Apondi, with support from the Red Sea Film Fund.

The film was born out of a difficult period in the director’s life, as he was mourning the loss of his younger brother. It was while sifting through videos he’d recorded of the joyful times the siblings shared that Hauser decided to create something at the intersection of loss and memory — a collage of “beautiful moments” that could elide the tragedy at its heart while helping him process his own grief.

That decision informed the backdrop for “Princess Mumbi’s” film-within-a-film conceit, as Kuve sets out to eulogize his lost love through cinema, even as he becomes one of the most sought-after directors on the planet. Making the most of affordable AI technology, Hauser gives his imagination free rein, crafting a clever montage of Kuve’s delightfully tacky cinematic output, and giving a wistful shoutout to the very Venice Days showcase where “Prince Mumbi” premieres, with a shot of a lonely gondolier rowing beneath a sign for the 94th Giornate degli Autori in the year 2097. 

“Princess Mumbi” was mostly filmed on location on the coast of Kenya — “the lighting, the shadows, everything was real,” says Hauser — with the director utilizing AI to build out the backdrop of his futuristic world, using “old techniques from the ’80s and ’90s where they just painted into the image,” he says.

The software could generate images in a flash, but the director found it far more challenging to make those images “work in a cinematic context.” “I had shots that took weeks because of rotoscoping, compositing and making static images feel alive,” he says. Hauser used a mix of tools — “one for generating, another for upscaling, another to convert images into motion” — a “patchwork process” that seemed in keeping with the low-fi, mash-up nature of the film. 

AI is developing by leaps and bounds — had he started “Princess Mumbi” today, Hauser estimates he would’ve wrapped up post-production in half the time — and the director is guardedly optimistic about where it’s heading. Despite the flashy flourishes the technology offers, Hauser still believes there’s a human element to filmmaking that no machine can reproduce. AI might someday soon “make the most beautiful, the most perfect art,” he says, but it can only extrapolate from the thousands of movies that have already been made. “The film’s message is that emotional nuance matters more than formula.”

While the director acknowledges that he “fears” AI, he also “recognizes its potential,” particularly by allowing filmmakers to take more “creative risks,” and by democratizing the tools of moviemaking — in Africa and beyond — that have long been solely in the hands of the privileged few.

“Till now, it was always Hollywood telling the stories of the whole world,” says Hauser. “And through this technology…[African filmmakers] are more able to tell their own stories. Not only Africa. We’ll get so many more different perspectives, and different types of storytelling.”