Pioneering South African AI-native film and television content producers, DragonStudios.ai’s 10-episode vertical drama series Mountain of Graves has been selected as a finalist in the Topwave Vertical Films Competition at the 3rd Annual Neu Wave AI Film Festival – part of LA Tech Week.
Mountain of Graves was commissioned by Buka Africa and written by DragonStudios.ai creative leads Donovan Marsh and Steven Cholerton in collaboration with creator and writer Phuti Lehong Buka, and produced entirely using AI filmmaking platforms. The series sees two brothers fighting to stop a mining company taking the mountain where their ancestors are buried. Thumi plants a spear in the red earth. Kabelo fights it in the archives. Neither of them knows the mountain has started fighting back.
The Neu Wave AI Film Festival has become a central meeting ground for filmmakers, technologists, and innovators exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming the art of storytelling. Located in the heart of Hollywood, the festival connects the traditions of professional filmmaking with the powerful new tools of AI production. By bringing together artists, engineers, studios, and emerging creators, Neu Wave is helping define what the next generation of cinema will look like. Selection at the Neu Wave AI Film Festival places filmmakers among a growing community of serious AI storytellers pushing the boundaries of filmmaking. As the field continues to evolve, the festival aims to remain at the centre of this movement: where the future of film is being imagined and created.
Two of the company’s projects in development, Dragon Hunter and Bad Muti, have also received international awards and recognition and the nomination for Mountain of Graves is yet another endorsement of the power and quality of its AI film production.
AI filmmaking pioneer Marsh has written, directed and edited some of South Africa’s most successful and beloved feature films including Spud with John Cleese and Troye Sivan and iNumber Number, as well as international film Hunter Killer with Gary Oldman and Gerard Butler.
“Mountain of Graves is just the latest demonstration of what we’re able to produce by embracing the possibilities of creating cinematic stories entirely generated by artificial intelligence,” he says. “We want to help take African stories and films to international audiences and believe that AI plays an important role in creating new films from scratch, supplementing the worlds filmmakers create with traditional locations and actors and providing essential components like visual effects to producers at a fraction of the traditional cost, to help our stories take their rightful place on the global stage”.
