Director Lance Oppenheim sold the concept of his new documentary sperm world (now streaming on Hulu) with a five-minute preview that now comprises the opening of the finished film. That scene was the first thing the crew filmed, and it’s easy to see why they started with it: two perfect strangers meet in an anonymous, uninviting hotel, and although she makes some tentative overtures toward polite chat, he’s more interested in get straight to the business and have sex. She compares the encounter to a “horrendous one-night stand” in voice-over, but it was no simple hookup, as the following shots in which she lovingly cradles her newborn child make clear. The couple met through a Facebook group dedicated to black market sperm donation and made the unorthodox decision to inseminate directly the old-fashioned way. The contrast between the hesitant, tense rigidity of lack of foreplay and the beatific calm of motherhood offers a brief description of the film’s thesis that, as strange as this behavior may seem, its results have a way of making everything makes sense.
“It always seemed like a good prelude to me,” Oppenheim tells Jugo Mobile having a few beers at Jimmy’s Corner, the last great pe bar still standing in midtown Manhattan. “It’s the only time in the film that you see a successful pregnancy as a result of a donation. There is a logic to this. You try to imagine what brought someone here, where they’re trying to lighten this conversation with this guy, and then once the awkwardness subsides, there’s this dream sequence of babies and promises, everything. sperm world Can deliver. If you are able to achieve what you set out to do, life is something so magnificent and transcendent that everything behind it is negated. What you had to do to make that happen no longer matters.”
Using Nellie Bowles New York Times article “The sperm kings have a problem: too much demand” As a starting point, the rest of sperm world deals with artificial insemination, an option no less intimate or emotionally tense for those who practice it. Oppenheim mentions that he was attached to the title from the earliest stage of production because of how it implies a wide variety of relationships with this practice, with each participant having their own reasons for covert sperm donation. Many fear that cost-prohibitive healthcare will leave them in financial ruin, or are uncomfortable with the anonymity of sperm banks. “Even the way the sperm is packaged is wild,” says Oppenheim. “If you make a donation, they pide the sample into several vials, and each vial can cost up to $1,500 each. In the medical establishment, most of these sperm banks are owned by huge hedge funds and are simply regulated by the government, not operated by it. “It is not a public service, it is completely privatized.”
The film traces the breadth of the theme with three subjects: Tyree, who must balance his calling to bestow the gift of life with his duty to his partner; Steve, a porcee with the confused idea that this might be a good way to meet someone; and Ari, a perpetual nomad who wanders among the homes of his more than one hundred descendants. Each of his journeys combines cringe comedy with sincere pathos, without either undermining the other. Tyree sees the humor in his unusual circumstances as he sets up a display in an empty shopping center parking lot, which does not detract from the emotional weight of his struggle to be a father in more than the biological sense. Once Steve understands that his failed attempts at flirting are going nowhere, he accepts the denial and moves toward an unlikely friendship. Ari arranges a sweet, surreal reunion for his numerous young sons and daughters, caught in a Sisyphean effort to give more of himself than he can humanly offer to his vast offspring.
“These things can start out being extremely transactional and then end up becoming very confusing and human,” Oppenheim says. “The perspective is less focused on the question of ‘how can I get pregnant?’ or ‘how can I get someone pregnant?’ and more about the real relationships and dynamics that take shape.” After tracking down several apps, including one called JustABaby, Oppenheim sought out collaborators through the Facebook group that the film uses as a kind of Greek chorus. Agreeing to let a film crew participate in the process of fathering a child required an extraordinary degree of trust, but the same openness that leads someone to search for reproductive material online also prepared him to share his insides with the camera. “The search for significance, in general, is the part I identify with the most,” he says. “That’s what drives many people to have children in the first place: to avoid feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. It is a desire to be seen by another person, who sees you as valuable. “No one wants to die alone.”
“That’s what drives many people to have children in the first place: to avoid feelings of inadequacy and loneliness. It is a desire to be seen by another person, who sees you as valuable. “No one wants to die alone.”
By focusing on male donors and turning the women who have contacted them into supporting actors, Oppenheim anticipates some response that she has missed the point. But he is fascinated by the “intersections of vulnerability” that motivate a man to approach connection in this confined and unusual capacity. By observing Ari’s myopia in how thin he stretches, Tyree’s drive for redemption after an incident in his past, and Steve’s reckless attempts at romance, the film challenges us to refrain from judgment while the full scope of flawed and idiosyncratic humanity comes into view. This permanent spirit of empathy also influences Oppenheim’s working methods, aimed at equitable cooperation between director and subject. “We shoot everything on a tripod, so you know exactly when we’re filming,” he explains, explaining his initial rejection of fly-on-the-wall. “If something uncomfortable happens that they don’t like, or if I have an idea to represent their reality that they feel is not honestly representative, a conversation occurs. “They are depicting real moments from their everyday lives and, as there will always be artifice with a camera watching, we look for the small moments of real truth.”
The decisive stylistic choices at play (interludes of expressionist abstraction, clear visual metaphors, digital effects that emulate the grain of filmstrip photography) mark sperm world as a work of constructed cinematographic art, which some viewers understand as the antithesis of the documentary form. Oppenheim is keen to emphasize that it is quite the opposite, that non-fiction also benefits from the aesthetic considerations that go into any other film, working towards the same goal of a higher truth. “When I watch interviews with talking heads, there’s nothing more dishonest than the way those images are captured,” he says. “It is an interrogation between two people, it is not a lived or observed experience. It feels like someone is being interrogated… We use every cinematic tool at our disposal to transport the viewer to not just observe someone’s life, but to inhabit how they see themselves. Everything works together. How can I make the film reflect their feelings and desires? People watch documentaries and think that trying to access subjectivity is impossible. It’s not.”
Oppenheim is currently considering a foray into feature-length fiction, possibly a film about grizzly bear-obsessed Canadian inventor Troy Hurtubise. But for now, while you complete sperm worldIn the life cycle of the streaming release, you can’t help but relate to the feeling of emptiness that comes after these men finish their duty and return to their own lives. He was attracted to the strange personalities of the “Sperm Kings” not because of their novelty, but because of the more familiar aspects of their experiences, among which was the need to do something meaningful for other human beings. Like anyone else, they are just “people trying to matter somehow.” Just as hopeful parents face an uphill battle through an antagonistic and often discouraging process, these power givers must deal with their own inner crises and insecurities. Oppenheim observes everything with a measured ambiguity, without absolving or condemning, with curiosity above all. As insatiably curious as he is, he is sure of one thing: “I will never look at an abandoned mall or a Macy’s parking lot the same way again. People could be donating anywhere.”
Carlos Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Jugo Mobile, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The AV Club, Vox, and many other reputable publications. His favorite movie is Boogie Nights.
