Robolove

Whenever somebody builds robots in a fictional film, either something goes wrong or they're evil from scratch. Without trying to prove the opposite, Maria Arlamovsky chooses a different approach which plays out as a curious, bizarre, and ambivalent journey into imagined futures. She enters these artificial chambers of horrors in which naked masks learn to smile and everything is done to make machines look and behave like humans. There she also talks to the minds who create those robots. The designers we believe to know from Hollywood are sometimes indeed sexists or nerds with strange visions of the future (“death will be an option“), but sometimes they are responsible people with exciting ideas. By giving space to different voices, Arlamovsky creates a dialogue between technological enthusiasm and ethical questions. The difference between those two currents can best be simplified by two slightly varying questions: what makes us human and what do people want to achieve in the 21st century? It’s more than suspicious that money is never mentioned by those inventing our so-called future. Like so much of what we see in Austrian cinema the film is also a lesson in cinematic objectivity. Judgement is left to the viewer. (Viennale)