Donor Unknown

Wouldn’t you know it, you wait a lifetime for a great film about sperm donation and two come along in quick succession — sorry Whoopi Goldberg and Ted Danson, Made in America isn’t one of them.

Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the indie break-out success of last year, was a riotous imagining of what would happen when children born through artificial insemination go looking for their biological father. Jerry Rothwell's fascinating Donor Unknown, however, is the real deal.

JoEllen is a happy all-American teenager living in Pennsylvania with her two mothers. She doesn’t have a dad, she had a donor. His name: Donor 150. All she knows of him is through his donor profile, which she has studied since she was a little girl, imagining what the strapping 28-year-old dancer with a penchant for karate is like now and how much he is like her.

Turns out Donor 150’s dance career didn’t quite pay the bills, but his thrice weekly donations to the “masturbatorium” at the California Cryobank did. So when JoEllen starts her search for donor dad she finds something she wasn’t expecting: dozens of half-siblings.

This engaging documentary is screening 9 June at the Glasgow Film Theatre in association with Glasgow Science Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and specialists from the fields of reproductive medicine, fertility and medical ethics. The screening begins at 18.00.