Offspring

Canadian filmmaker Barry Stevens is one of the first babies to have been fathered by artificial insemination. He realizes that he might have more than 200 half-brothers and half-sisters, so he decides to trace them through DNA testing. His eventual goal is to find the donor, his biological father, but his search runs into a number of obstacles. Stevens edited the documentary as a kind of detective story, in which he always fights setbacks with humor. Not everyone is willing to cooperate, and one woman refuses the DNA test for fear of finding out that she is not the person she thinks she is. In contrast, Stevens cannot wait to find his spitting image -- can his father be the scientist named Weisner, whose jaw and lips are suspiciously similar to his? Stevens sinks his teeth into the subject, surrounding himself with saliva samples and diagrams of family trees and DNA results. In the process, he connects half-brothers and half-sisters who were unaware of each other's existence. Stevens argues in favor of lifting the veil on donor anonymity, even appearing on TV shows to plead his case. And in the style of a good whodunit, the denouement of the film comes as a surprise.