Ninkasi – The Origin of Beer

  • Official Selection Neu Wave AI Film Festival 2026

  • Official Selection Almamoura Festival 2026

A film by Daniel Bellone 2026 · 19 min

Watch the film
Walk the world

Before beer was a drink, it was a prayer.

In ancient Sumer, brewing belonged to women — daily bread, sacred offering, and civic life in a single cup.

The oldest song ever written to a drink is also the oldest recipe. It is sung to Ninkasi, the goddess who taught us to brew.

Official screener — for festival & press consideration

Ninkasi – The Origin of Beer

Directed by Daniel Bellone

2026 · 19 min · USA

In the world's first city, a young woman touched by grief discovers the sacred craft of brewing — and rises from the margins of Uruk to give humanity its first taste of shared joy.

The story

Before beer was a drink, it was a prayer. Ninkasi – The Origin of Beer opens where the Sumerians themselves began the story — with a goddess, born of sacred waters, who taught humankind to brew. In the mud-brick streets of Uruk, the world's first city, a young woman living in the shadow of loss learns the craft that bears the goddess's name.

The Euphrates reed marshes at misty dawn — a reed boat in the foreground, egrets on still water, palms and mud-brick houses against the sunrise.

As her brew draws the city to her door, she rises from obscurity to renown — and discovers that the same vessel can hold both mourning and celebration. Woven from history, myth, and the oldest hymn ever written to a drink, the film closes not with an answer, but with a door left open.

The rite

  1. 01

    The grain drinks the sun.

  2. 02

    Fire wakes the mash.

  3. 03

    The vessel breathes.

  4. 04

    The cup is shared.

Four thousand years ago

This film is a myth, woven from real things.

c. 3500–3000 BCE
The White Temple rose over Uruk's marshes.
c. 2450 BCE
Gold-and-lapis drinking straws were buried with Queen Puabi at Ur.
c. 2400 BCE
Kubaba, the tavern-keeper who became king of Kish, is the only woman on the Sumerian King List.
c. 1800 BCE
The Hymn to Ninkasi, sung long before it was written down, is displayed in the epilogue exactly as scholars transcribe it.

Beer is older than writing — and the first written tablets counted it.

The film gathers these truths, from across a thousand years of Sumer, around one fire.

Small clay oil lamps burning in a dark mud-brick niche, wool and woven mats in shadow around the flames.
The dead drink first. The living sing.

The director

Portrait of director Daniel Bellone in a wide-brimmed hat, black and white.

Daniel Bellone is an Argentine-born singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles, devoted to giving modern voice to humanity's oldest sacred sounds. Born in Buenos Aires in 1981, he formed his first band at thirteen and pursued acting in his early twenties before a mystical awakening at twenty-three drew him to India, where eleven years of immersion with Vedic monks became the foundation of his life's work.

Between 2014 and 2025 he carried that work across the world — more than 400 concerts, workshops, and retreats in over 30 countries under the banner “Awakening Through Music.” A voting member of the Recording Academy since 2022, he has released the albums Kamadah, Kunjara, and Sacred Chants of a Lifetime (2024), recorded with composer Craig Pruess, and is the founder of Mantra Academy, an online school of mantra and meditation. He also works at the frontier of artificial intelligence as a machine-learning engineer.

Ninkasi – The Origin of Beer is his directorial debut: a lifetime spent resurrecting ancient hymns for modern ears, now turned toward the screen — a Sumerian story of creation, celebration, and the divine feminine, brought to life with the newest storytelling tools of our age.

I have spent my life singing hymns that are thousands of years old.

As a musician devoted to Sanskrit mantras, my work has always been an act of resurrection — taking sacred words that survived millennia and letting them breathe again in modern ears. So when I encountered the Hymn to Ninkasi — a nearly four-thousand-year-old Sumerian song that is at once a prayer to a goddess and a recipe for beer — I recognized it instantly as kin: sacred knowledge preserved in verse, waiting to be sung again. This time, I chose to sing it in images.

Ninkasi – The Origin of Beer is grounded in truth. In ancient Mesopotamia, brewing belonged to women, beer was worship as much as nourishment, and civilization itself gathered around the shared cup. I wanted to honor that history through a single life — a woman who rises from anonymity through her craft — and through the oldest human contrast I know: mourning and the celebration of life, grief and joy fermenting side by side until one becomes the other.

I made this film largely alone, with the newest generative tools of our age. That felt right, not merely practical. My days are spent as an AI engineer, my nights with ancient chants; this film is where the two halves of my life finally meet — the newest instruments of creation placed in service of one of humanity's oldest songs.

If the film leaves you with wonder — an open door rather than an answer — it has done what a hymn is meant to do.

— Daniel Bellone, director

Credits

Directed, written & produced by
Daniel Bellone
Music
Created with Suno
Year
2026
Country
USA
Runtime
18 min 50 sec

Made with

Higgsfield AI (Seedance 2.5 video, Nano Banana Pro imagery) · MiniMax H3 (Omni Reference) · Google Flow (Gemini Omni Flash) · Dreamina Seedance 2.5 · sync.so (lip sync) · Suno (music) · DaVinci Resolve Studio 21 (edit/finish) · Topaz Video (upscale)