We’ve heard about them countless times in movies, and have more often than not been warned against their coming, but how prepared are we really to accommodate androids on this side of the silver screen?

Love them or spite them, it seems that the advent of androids in our world is fast becoming a reality, and it may not be long before we look back on Frankenstein, Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey with an acute sense of irony.

If until now we’ve felt at a safe distance from these variously alarming futures, we may find the unlikely visions of the here and now portrayed in Mechanical Love a little too close for comfort.

The documentary’s focus is a primitive but real-life android made in the image of its creator. You may even recognise it.

Last year, photos of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and his robotic doppelganger flooded the international press with commentators enthusiastically celebrating the remarkable novelty.

But for the Japanese engineer the android stands for something much greater than the perfunctory plaything that many people prefer it to be.

Ultimately, his goal is to define the quality that gives humans ‘sonzai-kan’, an aura of presence. We all have it, but some more than others. Is it possible to artificially create this ambivalent quality, and will harnessing it bring man and machine closer together?

Trying to answer the question would not only be pushing robotics to further heights, but seeking to better understand what it is to be human.

 “We don’t understand ourselves, but others understand us well,” claims Ishiguro in one scene of the film, conceding an awkward smile as he goes on to say how he has “learned to be me” through watching the way others manipulate his electronic clone to mimic his manners.

Ishiguro’s affections towards robots are still that of longing, but when he learns to love, the world will be changed. Before we know it, all those prophesies will have come true for better or for worse.

And one day we may look back at Mechanical Love and reminisce about the beginning of a new era in the way we might fondly sit back and watch early films now with the faint whirring of the projector in the background, in smug knowledge of what cinema has since become.

Mechanical Love is screening on 19 and 22 June at Filmhouse.