J Paul Johnson
A selection of both Toronto and Venice’s International Film Festivals, the astonishing Memory of Princess Mumbi tells a story as old as time in a presciently futuristic way with the most current of technologies: Artificial Intelligence. That it does so may offend some viewers who loathe how omnipresent AI-generated slop both pollutes our social feeds and depletes our water supplies. But writer-director Damien Hauser has created here a film that unlocks AI’s potential for the medium, both echoing its rich history of innovation and pointing to a potential democratized future.
In one way, the story is a familiar one: Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl. Yet Hauser’s narrative is as complex as his protagonists are engaging. The story is set in 2093, in a postwar future where social media and virtual reality platforms have been outlawed for their societal ills. (I’ll bet some of you are signing on already!) Filmmaking has been democratized by new technologies but also outlawed. Protagonist Kuve (Abraham Joseph) is undaunted: he travels to Umata to document the aftermath of the war, employing AI in whatever means necessary. He’s a charming rogue, full of fire and talent, but not necessarily especially thoughtful about his own ethics as a documentarian: for example, he’s not above using AI to change a subject’s facial expression to suit his own needs.
When Kuve meets a local girl named Mumbi (Shandra Apondi) who wants to assist with his project, he finds himself both undeniably attracted to her and conflicted by her presence. She challenges him to think, and hard, about his using AI the way he does, as well as about his ethics and aesthetics more generally. Soon, they become a formidable team and Kuve commits himself to making his film without AI. They and Kuve’s loyal friends Trenndy (Michael Garama) and Damien (writer-director Hauser himself) dedicate themselves to the task despite the local government’s closing in on their rogue operation.
There is a second problem: Mumbi is, it turns out, betrothed to another: to a prince named Prince (Samson Waithaka), ruler of a neighboring kingdom. She and Kuve take flight together, for a time making successful films together while on the run in Europe, but before long Mumbi returns to her royal destiny. Heartbroken, Kuve plunges himself into his work, becoming an internationally famous star. Their destinies reunite once again six years later when she and Prince join the set of Kuve’s newest blockbuster, but there the couple’s unresolved tensions linger and lead to tragedy.
On the surface, Memory of Princess Mumbi‘s plot might seem, even despite its futuristic setting, unremarkable, but Hauser’s deft use of AI creates an astonishing Afrofuturist (a characterization the filmmaker himself finds Eurocentric) visual spectacle full of lush, creative backdrops of postwar Umata and imaginative renderings of Kuve’s post-Umata filmmaking career. Hauser’s smorgasbord of images is so rich and fulfilling it’s almost impossible to digest in a single sitting. I found myself thinking about the medium’s visionaries and their use of then-new technologies to advance storytelling: George Melies’ editing and set-design magic; Lotte Reiniger, silhouette stop-motion; Ray Harryhausen’s miniatures and practical effects; and dozens of others along the way who made film their medium by way of invention. Hauser’s deft use of AI to create a future world, all the while questioning its use, is remarkable.
While the gravity-defying cityscapes of Umata may stand out the most, the use of AI to imagine posters, award shows, and scenes from Kuve’s ascension as a filmmaker is also wildly inventive, playing on the very grammar of cinematic structure from pre-production to distribution and exhibition. Hauser’s AI is, here, a conceit, but one that makes the film what it is. Otherwise, Memory of Princess Mumbi is a stripped-down production with a single camera capturing simple actions between characters shot on locations (all in Kenya). But AI makes Hauser’s futuristic visions and far-flung narrative a possibility.
Were Memory of Princess Mumbi a mere exercise in world-building, none of its experimentation would matter. But its story—a Künstlerroman, really, paired with a romance—feels absolutely genuine and its characters cut from wondrously whole cloth. The leads—Abraham as Kuve and Apondi as Mumbi—are wonderfully charismatic and effusive performers whose work carries the film. For all its innovation, Hauser’s film never feels like a trick; it is, like all great films, a story, one to which its audiences, whether they live a century or a world away, can relate.
Hauser has said the film was, for him, a kind of therapy in the wake of his own younger brother’s death. The process of making it became therapeutic, a means of coping with his own grief and remembering that life, unlike drama, does not depend on conflict; it is and can be a series of small and not always causal moments, ones to be remembered, cherished, and celebrated. That he has made a film, buttressed by the use of Artificial Intelligence, that does just that, is no small miracle indeed.
