02/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: Swiss-Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser creates a film full of inventiveness, a mix between sci-fi, romance and mockumentary that reflects on the use of AI in cinema in a futuristic Africa

Ibrahim Joseph and Shandra Apondi in Memory of Princess Mumbi

Damien Hauser is only 24 and has already three films to his credit, in addition to numerous short films and documentaries. The Swiss-Kenyan director has been holding a camera since he was seven, and his fourth feature, Memory of Princess Mumbi [+see also:
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film profile], presented in competition at the 22nd Giornate degli Autori of the Venice Film Festival, is a surprising mix of genres, playful and colourful, at times chaotic but always entertaining to watch, that reflects the vitality and will to experiment of his young age.

Set up with a group of friends and few financial means, to face a difficult moment (the director had recently lost his younger brother), the film uses Artificial Intelligence to give shape to an African city from the future, Umata, where its characters – we are in 2093 – have been shooting a documentary about the consequences of a great war that has reinstated kingdoms and banned all technologies, which were responsible for making people depressed. Mumbi (Shandra Apondi) is a young actress, promised for marriage to a prince. While she waits to turn 21 and get on the throne, she joins a small crew made up of Kuve (Ibrahim Joseph) and his assistant (Damien Hauser himself), challenging her new friends to shoot the film without using AI.

The first part of Memory of Princess Mumbi centres therefore on the casting process, the interviews, rehearsals and reflections on cinema, in a kind of sci-fi mockumentary of boundless imagination. Then the plot starts to turn its attention to the feelings that are growing between Kuve and Mumbi; but Mumbi is about to turn 21 and soon the two will have to part. The second part of the film therefore jumps in time by a few years: Kuve meets Mumbi on a set. He still loves her, but she has changed, she married the prince and has lost the enthusiasm she once had. The prince (Samson Waithaka) decides to also act in the film, and thus he, Mumbi and Kuve give life to a messy love triangle, between one clapperboard and another – until Kuve decides to make another film, about Princess Mumbi herself.

Extremely layered (the various film projects intersect, in a slightly disorienting way), Memory of Princess Mumbi is steeped in Kenyan music and culture and offers moments of pure wonder, it is cool and crazy. But the most interesting aspect of this film – of which Damien Hauser is also the screenwriter, producer, composer, editor and director of photography – is its production. With little money, the young author has managed to give life to a highly respectable futuristic imaginary world, thanks to backgrounds created with AI, something that once could only have been possible in Hollywood and would cost millions of dollars. An original sci-fi film made in Africa and never before seen (it is also the first time that Kenya is present in Giornate degli Autori) that seem to open the way to new scripts and possibilities in cinema that were previously economically inaccessible.

Memory of Princess Mumbi was produced by Out of My Mind Films (Kenya) in co-production with Hauserfilm, and with the support of the Red Sea Film Fund. International sales are handled by Paradise City.

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 01/09/2025: Venice 2025 - Memory of Princess Mumbi

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Damien Hauser
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