KITA

An elderly, disabled Nigerian tech entrepreneur lives alone in a near-future city, sealed off from the world outside his door. When a malfunctioning delivery robot starts turning up at the same time every afternoon, he decides it must be choosing him. Its name is KITA. A 26-minute film about loneliness, dignity and community, and the fifth film in Season 2 of Beyond the Loop, Wonder Studios' anthology of original shorts.

It is the filmmaking debut of Jidenna, the Grammy-nominated artist behind "Classic Man", who sees AI as an evolution of hip-hop sampling. With no coding background he built a stop-motion-style look across a fully realized near-future world, designed that world, wrote the characters, built the story and scored the film himself, and made it because stop-motion films centered on Black characters rarely get greenlit through traditional channels. Executive producers CapCut, invideo, OpenArt and ElevenLabs supplied the tools; a behind-the-scenes episode follows on September 22.