NBO Film Festival: Damien Hauser’s “Memory of Princess Mumbi” Is A Heartwarming Retrofuturist Mockumentary

How much experimentation is too much for a creative mind? For Swiss-Kenyan filmmaker Damien Hauser, the answer seems elusive, determined by how effectively ideas are orchestrated. Memory of Princess Mumbi, Hauser’s retro-futuristic film and a co-production between Kenya and Switzerland, embodies this fluidity and abstraction of boundaries in storytelling, bestriding the threshold of fiction and reality. The feature film is an audacious and artistic confluence of narrative techniques and genres,  brilliantly weaving elements of romance, speculative fiction and the documentary form while incorporating Artificial Intelligence. This hybrid form becomes a provisional tool for navigating love, loss, memory, mental health and the conflict between advanced technology and human-centered storytelling.  

Memory of Princess Mumbi is set in the year 2093 in a futuristic African world that is rebuilding from the Great War. It is a world where technology is considered a threat and historical civilizations are revived. Through its distortive style and attempt at re-imagining reality, the film acquires a soul of its own, one that is humanist and surrealist, emotional and visceral, and yet calls attention to the ethical concerns around the adoption of technology in  capturing profound human experiences. Situating the narrative in an unfathomable world, Hauser’s quasi-documentary challenges the sophisticated, ultra-modern nature of contemporary society, often showcasing a society that is partly in touch with its roots and core human values. It is an attempt to find a balance between  the humanization and commodification of transformative experiences.

The film follows filmmakers Kuve (Abraham Joseph) and Damien Hauser who arrive in an African village Umada in hope of documenting the effects of the war in the lives of its inhabitants. While searching for a third partner to join the team as a presenter for the project, they encounter Mumbi (Shandra Apondi), an aspiring actress, who challenges their approach to filmmaking and encourages them to make the film without depending on AI. Kuve falls in love with the colourful and free-spirited Mumbi, and both of them share brief fun moments during Kuve’s sojourn. Meanwhile, Mumbi has been betrothed to a prince from childhood, whom she eventually gets married to. Six years later, Kuve, now a successful filmmaker in Europe, returns to the African village, and reconnects with Princess Mumbi. This ignites tensions between them, as the amiable Prince also tries to get along with Kuve. Through his narrative perspective, Kuve observes that his second coming is unlike the first: Mumbi has lost her natural spark and fallen into depression. The reasons for this are not elucidated, but the rest of the story is spent with Kuve attempting to help Mumbi discover her old self, before the bizarre death of the Princess is announced.

As a metafictional narrative, Memory of Princess Mumbi obsesses with its structure and strategies, in a manner slightly detrimental to the in-built story. The plot feels feeble, as there is no compelling graphical dramatisation of the established retro socio-political order in the fictional African hemisphere that is projected. Yet this does not take away from Hauser’s refreshing satire of traditional filmmaking and his evangelism for AI. There is a possibility of misinterpreting the grotesque trajectory of his work as a chimeric show of self-indulgence. But can progressive art exist without guts, without an innate drive for difference, without a sense of creative activism?

In a constantly developing world ruled by scientific inventions and AI-enabled technology, Hauser simply instructs us to embrace the positive side of things. Rather than revolting, he encourages responsible usage that does not truncate the core of humanity. The eventual success of Kuve in the film epically validates Hauser’s tolerance and penchant for new technology. Beyond the fictional universe, Hauser’s ambitious visual experimentation has been rewarding. Memory of Princess Mumbi had its world premiere in the Giornate degli Autori section at the Venice Film Festival and the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and also recently competed at Kenya’s NBO Film Festival, catering, on all occasions to African and global audiences and reinforcing the malleable, cross-cultural and highly adaptive texture of modern storytelling.