“Donating sperm makes me feel really good. Maybe it makes me feel wanted and wanted. Value something for everyone else,” says Stefan, one of the topics of “Spermworld,” the new FX documentary on Hulu that delves into the landscape of unregulated baby-making and why potential parents sought out these unconventional solutions.
Director Lance Oppenheim delves into another distinct group with his latest documentary, “Some Form of Heaven,” about The Villages in Florida. And there’s a throughline in Oppenheim’s films: They mix lushly saturated camerawork with a narratorless approach that lets characters tell their own stories about their sometimes quixotic lives. That’s also the case with his next project, “Ren Faire,” a three-part HBO series about the Texas Renaissance Festival and its charismatic founder premiering this summer.
Oppenheim entered the world of prolific sperm donors through former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles — who is married to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss — and was eager to find a donor. “She was in a relationship with another woman who they were looking for and they weren’t very satisfied with the options they were finding in the sperm banks,” says Oppenheim.
His search resulted in the article “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand,” and talking to Bowles on the article led him to realize there could also be a documentary about this fast-growing movement.
The lack of stock and the high price of traditional sperm banks have spawned, so to speak, a network of Facebook groups that allow potential mothers to solicit donations from men who were interested in helping them. “I started seeing all these people – women and men promoting themselves, and I started to feel like behind every post there was a story,” he says of the New York Times-produced documentary.
Some are clearly doing this for sexual reasons, whether it involves transient “NI” – natural insemination, or sex as a main scene in documentary programs, or through synthetic insemination. Some are tied to the idea that they are serving women, like donating blood, while others — like the film’s subject, Ari Nagel — like the idea that they are fathers to dozens or hundreds of children around the world.
One of the attractions is that, unlike traditional sperm banks, these potential fathers and sperm donors have the opportunity to meet each other, but there are only a few legal formalities that take place. “They are complete strangers – there is no plan for how these people should interact with each other outside of the regulated sperm donation center,” says Oppenheim. So he asked himself, “What are these tender, uncomfortable moments I’m seeing online? How do they translate into real life, and how can I be present to take advantage of that?
The film primarily follows three donors and several other potential mothers who agreed to let Oppenheim follow them with his camera: Nagel, a professor who travels the world in an effort to find the children he biologically fathered and live a few years. a small part of their lives, despite their mother’s discomfort with the idea; Stefan, a recently divorced man who is trying to establish a deeper friendship with his recipients, such as Rachel, a young woman battling cystic fibrosis; and Tyree, who loves helping people but whose own partner is struggling to get pregnant.
Intimate scenes from their lives include children learning what it means to have a donor who appears occasionally, tense periods of donation in suburban motels, and witnessing the crushing disappointment of women who are not able to conceive. Typically, Oppenheim says she had to stop filming when things got too private: “There were a lot of situations that aren’t in the film out of respect for the collaborators that were a little too painful, a little too weak.”
For women, they are in it to end up with a child. But what is motivating these men? “They are looking for something possibly bigger than themselves. They are trying to consolidate a legacy, a goal”, thinks Oppenheim. “A lot of people in the film are at different crossroads in their lives, wondering how they got to where they are and why their lives aren’t what they thought they would be. I believe that this kind of existential doubt is the factor that animates each scene.”
Oppenheim admits that several “sperm kings” are getting some kind of erotic satisfaction. “I don’t think it’s purely sexual, but there are parts of it that could be.”
Ultimately, he says, it’s about “How do we create households, how do we select households, what does the household look like?” And, as with other types of families, there may be legal problems with these casual donations which will be managed less strictly than with traditional sperm banks.
“There is no signing of contracts or exchange of paperwork,” explains Oppenheim. If the recipient is unable to care for a baby, in some states custody will revert to the father. “No one is actually signing contracts or exchanging documents,” he says. “It’s just not that applicable.”
It is claimed that Nagel fathered at least 138 children, but the film does not address whether this has any ethical or genetic ramifications, although on screen Nagel’s elderly mother loudly declares her opposition to the idea. “Part of my job as a filmmaker is that I really try not to express any sense of judgment. I enjoy spending time with him and relate to him in many ways,” says Oppenheim.
“I think a lot of people can have a powerful response to their life decisions,” Oppenheim acknowledges about Nagel, “but I think what’s interesting about him is I think his heart is in the right place even when his head is in a unique place.”
So what is the common thread that unites Oppenheim’s revealing documentaries? “I’m excited about this kind of unorthodox scenario,” he says. “Whether it’s Florida with The Villages, whether it’s the dream of retirement, or in the world of sperm, this is the pursuit of family. So ‘Ren Faire’ is a different question, but it’s really about power and proximity to power and discovering the kinds of things that sustain the fantasy, the feelings of inadequacy or loneliness.
Oppenheim believes his strategy of creating documentaries can serve as a bridge to narrative films. “I like people in films to be narrators of their own lived experiences – it’s like watching a fictional film.” In fact, he says he’s excited about the narrative script he’s working on and hopes to get it off the ground soon.
When making documentaries, “it usually feels like I’m working with actors because I let them into the process,” he says. “So I hope going back and forth between the two worlds won’t be too scary.”
“Spermworld” premieres Friday at 9pm on FX and streams starting Saturday on Hulu.