The Cathedral

Here's the sentence that stopped me cold, from the director himself: he set out to "make a movie that AI could never make" — and readily admits he could never have made it without AI.

Sit in that for a second. It's the most honest thing anyone's said about this technology all year, and he didn't mean it as a confession.

Damien Hauser, 24, Swiss-Kenyan, shot Memory of Princess Mumbi on location on the Kenyan coast — real light, real shadow, a real crew — then built the futuristic kingdom of Umata around that footage using AI-generated landscapes, frame by frame, some shots taking weeks of rotoscoping to make a static image breathe. The plot: in 2093, documentary filmmaker Kuve arrives in a village that banned technology after a war, and Mumbi — the local actress he falls for — dares him to make his film without AI. He can't, not entirely. Neither could Hauser. The film about resisting the machine was built by the machine, and it premiered anyway at Venice, the first Kenyan feature ever selected for Venice Days.

Call that hypocrisy if you want a fight. I'd call it the honest shape of every tool humans have ever had complicated feelings about — used anyway, argued with anyway, kept close anyway.

Most of the discourse around this film has missed something the plot synopsis doesn't mention: Hauser wasn't grieving a technology question when he made it. He was mourning his younger brother — sifting through old videos of the two of them, trying to build something at the intersection of loss and memory that could hold the joy without reopening the wound. The film-within-a-film structure, Kuve eulogising a lost love through cinema while slowly becoming the very thing he set out to resist, reads as clever sci-fi structure on the surface. Underneath, it's a grieving man's actual coping mechanism, given a runtime.

Watch what that does to the "for or against AI" argument everyone wants to have about this film. Grief doesn't negotiate with your principles. You reach for whatever tool lets you keep looking at the person you lost a little longer, and you don't audit the tool's politics first. Hauser needed a world vivid enough to hold his brother's memory; AI was fast enough to let him try building one. Somewhere in the two years of rotoscoping, the technology stopped being the point. The looking never stopped being the point.

Mumbi's dare, stated almost too plainly by the character herself, turns out to carry the sharpest idea in the film: never "use AI or don't." Always "don't let the tool decide what you're allowed to feel." Kuve spends the whole runtime reaching for exactly that — using every tool the future offers him, refusing to let any of them do his looking for him.

One more detail worth sitting with, because it says the essay in a single breath: Hauser estimates that if he made this film today, post-production would take half the time. The tools keep getting faster. The grief, notably, does not.

The interesting question was never "AI in art: yes or no." It's whether the tool is doing your looking for you, or simply helping you look longer at something you refuse to let go of. Those are different questions, and only one of them matters.

What's the "brother's footage" in your own life — the thing you'd reach for any tool available just to keep looking at a little longer?

Emma M. Joseph
Founder, WshUpnASUN® | Creator, CultureLensAI