I’ve worked on many National Day campaigns over the years. They usually begin with the same ingredients: flags, fireworks, orchestral music, and the expected skyline shot. They stir pride, but do they make you feel seen? This year was different.
For Saudi National Day 2025, HUMAIN showed what happens when AI is built to understand cultural nuance. We at Monks partnered on a film generated entirely by AI, and it became more than just a technical achievement. It was proof that when AI is trained within a culture, it can produce culturally accurate storytelling that is both authentic and emotionally resonant.
Why culturally accurate storytelling matters
AI content is everywhere. Anyone can subscribe to a model and generate images or clips. The problem is most of it flattens culture. It erases nuance.
Saudi Arabia in those systems often looks like a postcard from someone who has never been here. The National Day film shows another path. It proves that when you build AI from within the culture, trained on Arabic and refined by regional experts, you get results that belong.
This is what we set out to do: deliver culturally accurate AI that respects heritage, religion, and values while still looking ahead.
The breakthrough came when Luma AI released Ray3, its new video reasoning model. The question was simple: what if this technology could be used to create HUMAIN’s first National Day film? No time for formal training. No step-by-step manuals. Just one week of testing, refining, and learning on the fly.
The film avoided clichés. Instead of deserts and camels, it showed Riyadh’s glow at night, the cut of Najdi attire, the way light hits sandstone, and the sound of a rababah string bending in the air.
We made it possible to create a beautiful, culturally accurate AI-generated film for Saudi National Day. It goes beyond stereotypes and shows why an AI tool that understands Middle Eastern and Saudi culture is so important.
The technology behind the film
Ray3 is the first video model with reasoning built in. It does more than create random visuals; it plans, evaluates, and refines. HUMAIN paired it with its own HUMAIN Create platform and ALLAM, the Arabic-first LLM, to ensure cultural depth and accuracy.
Every pixel was rendered in HDR, giving the film a cinematic feel. Every sound was generated to match the rhythm of the visuals.
The result was a film that doesn’t just look like Saudi Arabia but feels like it.
Culturally accurate storytelling is the future
What excites me most is not the speed, although creating a film in a week is remarkable, or even the technical fidelity. It’s the cultural accuracy. For once, AI didn’t present us as a stereotype. It represented us as we are. With precision. With respect. With pride.
This National Day project is more than a celebration. It is proof that Saudi Arabia can lead in the future of AI media. It shows that our stories can be told on our terms, with our own values at the centre.
The same tools that made this film are now available for creators, students, brands, and institutions. From education to advertising to entertainment, this opens new possibilities for authentic storytelling at scale.
We will look back at this as the first marker of a shift. The moment when AI stopped being generic and started to reflect who we truly are.
When people ask what this film represents, I don’t say technology. I say pride.
Pride in our people.
Pride in our culture.
Pride in building tools that finally show us as we are.
This is just the beginning.
This is HUMAIN. Built from values. Built in Saudi. Built for the world.
By Moey Shawash, Strategy Director MEA at Monks.
