Rarely can a film be called wholly original, which places Damien Hauser's Memory of Princess Mumbi in a special class of its own. Employing wild world-building imagination, Hauser takes us to a retro-futuristic coastal Africa of 2093, where a filmmaker hopes to document lingering despair following the Great War that saw technology outlawed and ancient monarchies restored. There, he meets Mumbi, a spirited young actress who dares him to make his film without artificial intelligence, and who simultaneously captures his heart. At times mockumentary, at times tongue-in-cheek comedy, Memory of Princess Mumbi is, at its heart, an epic romance in the tradition of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a deeply personal meditation on loss and grief: Hauser made the film partly as a means of processing his younger brother's death. By using AI in the filmmaking process, and making AI a point of contention within the story itself, Hauser provokes us to assess the pros and cons: does the democratisation of filmmaking outweigh AI's ethical implications?