Join us at Common Room, Warehouse 51, to watch and discuss the film Mechanical Love (2007) in dialogue with director Phie Ambo, the first in a series of screenings and discussions led by Iram Ghufran.

Mechanical Love documents the interrelationship between robots and humans. The film takes us from the high temple of robot technology, Tokyo, Japan, to Braunschweig in Germany, to Italy and back to Copenhagen in Denmark. By this world tour, 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 also examines the cultural differences in how we accept emotional robots in the East and the West.

Iram Ghufran was in residence at Alserkal Arts Foundation in spring 2022. This programme is a continuation of conversations developed through her research, particularly around unsettling the boundaries of what it means to be called human.

Screening | 6:30 - 8pm

Discussion | 8 - 9pm

Biographies

Iram Ghufran is an award winning filmmaker based in New Delhi, India. Her work engages with speculative modes of storytelling, and her interests span the realm of techno spectral forms, nonhuman agency, micro practices of futurity and mythopoesis. Iram’s work has been screened widely within art and cinematic contexts including Experimenta India, Forum Expanded at Berlinale and Visible Evidence 21 among others. Iram is currently working on her doctoral film and thesis at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, London.

Phie Ambo was trained at the National Film School of Denmark, graduating as a documentary film director in 2003. Famous for her feature length documentary films true to the tradition of poetic, personal and cinematic language, Ambo deals with essential topics such as family relations, love, creative processes and artificial life. Phie Ambo has directed a number of award-winning films for the cinema, including major works such as Family (2001), Gambler (2005) and Mechanical Love (2007). In recent years,  Ambo has been especially interested in pursuing work of a more thematic nature, and this in the form of a trilogy focusing on the relation between science and human existence.