Same Story, Another Culture: Narrative Cultural Re-instantiation for Cross-Cultural Video Generation

Reinterpreting a narrative across cultures requires more than changing visual appearance: cultural substitutions must jointly preserve narrative functions and relations. We introduce Narrative Cultural Re-instantiation, the task of generating a target-cultural video from a source-cultural narrative while preserving its specified story structure. The central challenge is that individually plausible substitutions need not form a coherent whole. We propose CultureWeaver, a training-free framework that separates cultural correspondence from visual realization. An evidence-grounded Visual Cultural Memory supplies visually supported candidates annotated with narrative functions, affordances, and relations. CultureWeaver organizes retrieved candidates into a graph and jointly aligns them with the narrative through relation-aware semi-relaxed structural transport, balancing functional compatibility and relational consistency while allowing irrelevant candidates to receive negligible mass. Frozen generative models render the resulting cultural bindings into videos. We construct a benchmark of 200 narrative scenes across two target-cultural settings, with task-specific evaluation of narrative preservation, cultural fidelity, functional validity, and relational coherence. Automated evaluation and human judgments favor CultureWeaver over competing methods, while controlled ablations support the benefits of structured cultural memory and joint correspondence. Code and benchmark data are available in our https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICLR2027_CultureWeaver-B317/anonymous repository.