Spermworld

There’s a particular level of skill needed to navigate the world of Facebook Marketplace. It’s easy enough to learn how it works. Click the icon, browse by category, message the seller, haggle over pricing, choose a meeting place, and — if it’s not actually a scam like the persistent voice in the back of your head insisted it would be from the start — complete the transaction. It requires a certain knack to master, however. The true experts can find the greatest items, spot the fake listings, and snag the best deals. Of course, this is all in pursuit of a vintage sweater or an antique table. Imagine jumping through these hoops in search of a sperm donor instead.

This is the reality of the titular Spermworld, one of social media’s grayest gray areas: tens of thousands of sperm donors and aspiring parents commingling in a private Facebook group, hoping to find the perfect match. Whether it be fights with the insurance companies, insurmountable blockades in place for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, a basic lack of funding, or the rules and regulations of sperm banks — not to mention the anonymity — there can be any number of reasons why a person or a couple might not want to go about acquiring this genetic material the traditional way. Thus, the Wild West of finding a donor on Facebook.

Lance Oppenheim’s documentary — based on a January 2021 article in the New York Times — follows three of the presumably innumerable types of donors one might encounter online. There’s Tyree, a modest, unassuming man who struggled to find work post-prison and turned to donating for some fast cash. Years later, he continues to donate full-time while trying to start a family of his own with his fiancée, Atasha. Audiences are later introduced to “Stefan,” the online persona of a recently divorced retiree who donates for free. He strikes up a nebulous donor-recipient relationship with Rachel, a young single woman battling cystic fibrosis. We also meet Ari, a bombastic “sperm king” with over 130 kids in the U.S. and abroad who travels from city to city, spending a little bit of time with as many of his children as often as he can.

As in Oppenheim’s masterful debut doc, Some Kind of Heaven (2020), Spermworld weaves these three threads together with a moody, melancholic thread. Through lonesome confessionals to the camera and candid conversations with friends and family, it’s made clear that each member of this trio receives a not-insignificant sense of joy from providing their samples to people in need. On the other hand, there’s an equal but opposite amount of heartache from the women featured. Though they might not explicitly blame the feeling on him, Tyree’s fiancée and daughter both radiate a palpable sadness as a result of his actions. Rachel wrestles with the blurry boundary between her and Stefan, as well as her own personal struggles to conceive. Ari’s mother’s disappointment in his lifestyle seems to know no bounds.

Interestingly, Oppenheim, along with cinematographer David Bolen and editor Daniel Garber, present Spermworld like a narrative feature. (Questions of authenticity are inevitable, but this is one of the most uninteresting and reductive ways to talk about a work of documentary filmmaking — especially docs of this caliber.) Tyree and Atasha’s story could pass for a proper three-act drama. Stefan and Rachel’s often plays out over voiceover and split-screen compositions that play into the “artificial” of artificial insemination. And Ari’s sections might as well be a comedy, specifically one of the cringe variety. It’s in line with the unique touch Oppenheim brought to the stories of Anne, Reggie, Barbara, and Dennis in Some Kind of Heaven, only a tad more expressive.

There’s a very fine line between respect and ridicule when it comes to subject matter as bonkers as this, but Oppenheim never strays too far to one side or the other. A student of the great Ross McElwee and Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab director Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Oppenheim demonstrates with Spermworld that his filmic voice is one of the most unwavering in documentary and narrative alike. And, in an era where hard-edged docs are sanded down for max appeal, prolonged to three or four hour-long episodes to boost streaming metrics, and hacked apart in the editing bay to find the next viral sound bite (ethics be damned), it feels like nothing short of a miracle that something this intimate and peculiar could score a primetime slot on a Disney-owned cable network. This critic eagerly awaits wherever Lance Oppenheim journeys from here.