Directed by Lance Oppenheim
Three men enter the new wild west of baby making, online forums where sperm donors connect with hopeful parents, but find themselves exchanging more than just genetic material.
Mundo Esperma
USA True/False Film Festival 
Puerto RicoR 
US Virgin IslandsR USAR 
UK Puerto RicoR US Virgin IslandsR USAR Puerto Rico UK US Virgin Islands USA 
made me think about cum in a profound way
this one puts the “cum” in “documentary”
The New York Times and FX let us make a documentary and call it Spermworld; I feel like a winner already
Lance Oppenheim is in a class of his own as a documentarian.
”I just saw David Lynch’s Mulholland drive this weekend.
It was Naomi Watt’s break out role.
Fascinating movie.”
Glad I came
Went to Spermworld and everyone there said they knew you
This avoids the trappings of being a Viceland “Look at these freaks!” spectacle like I feared it would be, and taps into something more intelligent. The film interrogates the questions you’re probably asking: “Why are these woman pursuing this black market over official channels?” “Why are these men donating their sperm for little to no cost?” through the story of three donors. One of them, Ari, is the film’s most amusing “character”, having fathered 100+ children, which he visit on a few year cycle, and who he writes birthday messages to using ChatGPT. His family dynamic is brilliantly displayed, and a conversation with his mother late into the film is memorable as it as completely brutal. The three leads’ stories…
“I’m getting too old to be jerking off in a public restroom.”
My brother in Christ, you always have been.
Endlessly fascinating and even remarkable stuff - deeply modern, and what seems esoteric on the surface slowly reveals itself to be the foundation of something which begins a process of redefining concepts of family, sexual and platonic relationships, even circumstantial relationships- a child being removed from their birth mother and left in the care of the donor, for example. Also beautifully and inventively shot and edited: what could so easily turn into a talking head documentary almost feels like fiction - that is to say, it's engaging in the way a narrative film is and is devoid of the cold objectivity that's more the nature of the form. Subjects start to feel like characters and as a result the sense…
Lance Oppenheim continues to be the chief documentarian of middle American eccentricities, exploring these worlds with a whimsical, melancholic, but still loving gaze. There's a lot of overlap between the tone an emotional space this occupies, and what The Curse taps into, with the exception of this being Documentary(?) in format. I only put a question mark beside the documentary bit because while this is clearly "unscripted" material, Oppenheim is so cinematic and intentional in how the narrative is constructed, through editing, shot selection, and use of score, that the lines between reality and constructed fantasy seem to blur, an effect which is always relevant to his subjects, who often seem to be living in a surreal fantasy world of their own making.
On paper this feels equally cringy and yet a subject that I know nothing very little about so what better than a documentary to enlighten oneself with the material.
So immediately we are confronted with these main three men giving there sperm(money/free) in order for ladies to have babies. Each different in personality and age we see their lives unfold in the length of the film.
I did not connect with any of these men and really question their motives and wished that the director tackled some numbers of how much does an actual sperm clinic charge to what are some of these men charging. What are the legalities like could they be sued(and they can cause one was but…
