"Mechanical Love" is a documentary on the interrelationship between robots and humans. The film portrays people who have a close relationship with a robot, and it takes us from the high temple of robot technology, Tokyo, Japan, to Braunschweig, Germany, to Italy and back to Copenhagen, Denmark. By this world tour director Phie Ambo seeks to highlight the human need for love and our craving to be loved by others - perhaps the two most important aspects of life. Through the main characters, she examines the cultural differences in how we accept emotional robots in the East and the West.

A few decades ago robots still looked like moving toolboxes. This has changed radically. Today’s humanoids not only look like people, they can roll their eyes and wink, too. In this film, they come mainly from Japan, Korea and the U.S. Ishiguro Hiroshi is a pioneer in the construction of such artificial humans. He even built himself a twin. But most of these new creatures are female and, in line with their creators’ fantasies, endowed with the attributes desired in a patriarchal society: “It’s going to be a woman, so the smile is important,” one of the developers instructs his assistant. Almost all the androids have a dollface bearing a none-too-intelligent and submissive expression, saucer eyes and a slightly opened mouth. Only at the Terasem company in Vermont a talking woman’s bust of more mature age called “BINA 48” is supposed to mimic human behaviour emotionally, too.
It’s not surprising that the developers attribute all kinds of world-improving qualities to their creatures and spurn potential criticism in advance. Or are human beings just machines anyway, as Ishiguro claims? This closely observing film without comments by Maria Arlamovsky offers deep insights into this Brave New World, allowing us to form our own judgement.

Science fiction has long anticipated the rise of machine intelligence. Today, a new generation of self-learning computers is reshaping every aspect of our lives. Incomprehensible amounts of data are being collected, interpreted, and fed back to us in a tsunami of apps, smart devices, and targeted advertisements. Virtually every industry on earth is feeling this transformation, from job automation to medical diagnostics, from elections to battlefield weapons. Do You Trust This Computer? explores the promises and perils of this developing era. Will A.I. usher in an age of unprecedented potential, or prove to be our final invention?