Damien Hauser shot his fourth feature about six weeks after his younger brother died. He was 24 years old.
His brother, Charles Philip Hauser, was 14 when he was killed in an accident involving a stolen motorcycle. Hauser did not set out to make a film about grief. He needed something to do.
“I shot the film only about one and a half months after he passed away because I simply needed something to do, something that could distract me,” he tells The Nollywood Reporter. “The fact that the film became so much about grief and about focusing on beautiful memories was never really a conscious decision. It was only later that I realized how deeply those things were connected.”
The film is Memory of Princess Mumbi. It runs for 79 minutes and is set in 2093 in the fictional African kingdom of Umata. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 1, 2025, in Giornate degli Autori, also known as Venice Days.
The film became the first Kenyan feature selected for the Venice section and later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. In April 2026, it won the Golden Tulip for Best Film at the Istanbul International Film Festival.
Its East African theatrical release began on August 7, 2026, with screenings in Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania through Bigger Motion. Monument Releasing also released the film in the United States on August 14.
Hauser has been open about the contradiction at the centre of the film. He wanted to make a movie that AI could not make, yet AI was what allowed him to create its futuristic world on a limited budget.
Hauser began experimenting with AI image generation in 2023.
“Ever since I was a child, I had imagined worlds that I wished I could one day see on the big screen,” he says. The technology gave him a way to build those worlds without the resources usually required for large-scale science fiction.
“When I tried it, it worked much better than I expected. That was the moment I realized I could finally tell stories set in worlds I had always dreamed of creating.”
Rather than using AI to replace his actors, Hauser used it primarily for backgrounds and visual effects. The film combines those generated environments with live-action performances and real locations in Kenya.
The premise is deliberately meta. Kuve, played by Abraham Joseph, is a young filmmaker who travels to Umata to document the aftermath of the Great War of the 2070s, a conflict that ended modern technology and led to the return of ancient kingdoms.
He meets Mumbi, played by Shandra Apondi, an actress who challenges him to make his film without AI. Kuve and Mumbi fall in love, even as she is promised to a prince, played by Samson Waithaka.
The film moves between romance, mockumentary and science fiction while questioning the technology that helped create it.
“AI gave me the opportunity to tell a science-fiction story that would otherwise have been completely beyond my budget,” Hauser says. “In that sense, it was incredibly liberating. But at the same time, I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the ethical questions surrounding the technology, and I felt the need to address them within the film itself.”
That discomfort came from the limitations Hauser encountered while making the film. He has spoken about seeing AI tools alter the appearance of his Black actors, including making their skin lighter.
“I will always work with real actors and scripts written by real people,” Hauser says. “When it comes to visual effects, however, I think it’s inevitable that AI will fundamentally transform that part of filmmaking.”
The film’s approach to conflict was another deliberate choice. Rather than building its story around escalating confrontations, Hauser wanted to spend more time with ordinary moments between the characters.
“One of the classic rules of filmmaking is that stories need conflict,” he says.
“With this film, I deliberately tried to move away from conflict and instead focus on the beauty of ordinary moments. Throughout the film, I tease conflicts that never actually happen.”
The experiment had its limits. During the editing process, which lasted about a year and a half, Hauser began to understand why some of the conventions he had tried to avoid existed in the first place.
“During editing, I had to learn why those storytelling rules exist in the first place.”
The extended editing period was largely driven by the film’s visual effects. Hauser normally works quickly, but Memory of Princess Mumbi gave him more time to keep revisiting the cut.
“It really tested my patience,” he says. “At the same time, it gave me the opportunity to keep refining the edit throughout that entire period, which I normally don’t do and I think that ultimately made Memory of Princess Mumbi much stronger.”
The AI-generated images are not always seamless. At points, the compositing remains visible, making the artificial construction of the world part of the film’s visual character.
The film’s future does not rely on the familiar neon-heavy imagery often associated with science fiction. Instead, Hauser uses Kenyan landscapes, physical locations and African cultural references alongside the generated environments. Festival materials describe the film as a retro-futurist romance that uses AI to build a world that would otherwise have required a much larger budget.
The Venice premiere changed the film’s trajectory.
“It gave the project an amazing start,” Hauser says. “Since then, the film has traveled around the world, and now it’s finally receiving a proper East African theatrical release.”
His previous films had also travelled internationally, but securing meaningful releases at home remained difficult.
“I think premiering at Venice helped people take the film more seriously, which ultimately made this homecoming release possible. That makes me incredibly happy.”
The Nairobi homecoming screening took place on August 7, 2026, at Prestige Cinema on Ngong Road, before the film expanded into its wider East African theatrical run. Bigger Motion subsequently listed screenings across Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania.
Monument Releasing acquired the film’s rights for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, with the US theatrical release set for August 14.
Hauser has been making films since he was seven. He studied film at the SAE Institute from 2016 to 2020 and is now based in Zurich. His previous features include Blind Love, Theo: A Conversation With Honesty and After the Long Rains.
He has worked with larger crews but increasingly prefers smaller productions.
“Over time, I’ve increasingly learned to embrace my limitations,” he says. “I’ve reached a point where I actually feel more comfortable working this way than on a traditional set with a much larger crew.”
There is a trade-off. Smaller productions offer Hauser more creative freedom but less financial security.
“On larger productions, there’s naturally much more responsibility because so much money is at stake, which makes experimentation much harder. At the same time, those productions are far more sustainable professionally.”
He can imagine working both ways. It depends on the project.
Memory of Princess Mumbi is dedicated to Charles Philip Hauser. The dedication appears near the end of the film, bringing the personal connection that runs beneath the story back into focus.
Hauser does not describe the film as a cure for grief, or even as something that fundamentally changed how he processed his brother’s death.
“I believe it’s essential in life to focus on the beautiful moments, especially when things are hard,” Hauser says. “It gave me something meaningful to devote myself to, but I wouldn’t say it transformed my grief.”
That distinction matters. Memory of Princess Mumbi does not try to explain his brother’s death or present filmmaking as a solution to it. Instead, Hauser found a way to make a film about memory, beauty and the ordinary moments people hold onto after loss.
The film began as something to keep him occupied. It became a story about a filmmaker trying to preserve moments in a world that has lost much of what came before it.
And somewhere between those two ideas, Hauser found the film he was trying to make.
