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Written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Starring Tilda Swinton, Karen Black, Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak and Jeremy Davies

Inspired by the first artificially intelligent “bot,” Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Teknolust” played as an official selection of the Sundance, Toronto and Berlin film festivals, and received the Alfred P. Sloan Award for writing and directing.

Hershman Leeson is herself an interesting character, hailing from the art world, and has worked with Oscar-winner Tilda Swinton on a number of occasions. In “Teknolust” Swinton plays herself and her three cyborgs (aka “Self-Replicating Automatons”). The cyborgs are intelligent, artificially so, and are immortal BUT, and it’s a big one, they need the male Y chromosome (collected the old fashioned way, from sperm) as sustenance to survive.

While that sounds like the premise for pornography, Hershman Leeson manages ot capture the film in a much less exploitative fashion, focusing instead on the quest for sperm as fraught with the perils of falling in love, and what attachments and relationships mean to our quest for identity and place.

Swinton is one of those people who is inherently watchable no matter the occasion, the geometrical strength in her face auguring well for representing a series of cyborg clones.

Leeson simply separates the cyborgs by color palette and collars bearing their names, Ruby, Olive and Marinne, each of whom enjoy their Y-chromosome infused tea in equal measure, sleep when given such indication, are educated via downloads, and eat via syringe. The real scientist, Dr. Rosetta Stone (Oh, if only she cold teach me how to learn Spanish), is painted as less attractive than her subsets, colored more prevalently in drab, and bears pronounced curls to separate her from her straight-haired vixens.

Released on DVD by Microcinema International, the extras include a Q&A with Hershman Leeson and Swinton, as well as footage of “DiNA,” the artificially intelligent bot that inspired the film, which has been successfully exhibited at galleries around the globe since 2006.

Despite its synthetic construct, there’s an interesting emotional core at the center of the film that endears it to the viewer willing to treat it with respect. Swinton is incredible, and Urbaniak hyper-interesting. Swinton’s so good at the four roles she plays that there is little wonder how and why she became Hershman Leeson’s muse, her ability to engender each of the identities with a distinct persona is remarkable, and the film’s components ingratiate us to the film. “Teknolust” is conceptually brilliant, and utterly compelling.