Hugo pop! | These serial sperm donors

After the nightmarish roommate and the stoned guru, there is a new type of villain in crime documentary miniseries: the self-important man who multiplies so-called “artisanal” sperm donations and fathers hundreds of babies, without any regard for the risks of inbreeding linked to this dubious practice.

The Crave platform offers the excellent miniseries Father of 100 children journalists Marie-Christine Bergeron and Maxime Landry, who traced three of these serial sperm donors, whose liquid contribution – and unpaid, I should point out – has produced more than 600 children in Quebec since 2008.

The worst? These three sperm donors, identified in the four episodes of Father of 100 children as X, Y and Z, come from the same family. The 600 kids born from their homemade offerings, who therefore did not go through a fertility clinic, are all genetically related. Red flag.

Even worse? The X-donor in Crave’s series, the oldest of the three, never revealed that he carries the gene for a rare hereditary disease called tyrosinemia, which can cause kidney and liver problems. The mothers discovered it after their toddlers were born. Deep red flag.

Netflix has joined this family DNA channel with the three-episode miniseries The Man with a Thousand Children (The Man With 1000 Kids), which tells the astonishing story of a 42-year-old Dutchman who is said to be the biological father, fasten your chastity belt, of between 600 and 3,000 children, all half-brothers or half-sisters.

It’s impossible to get a precise count because Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a former high school teacher turned cryptocurrency YouTuber, has spread his seed since 2007 not only in several European countries, but also in Asia, Canada, the United States, Mexico and Australia.

Unlike Crave, which doesn’t reveal the names of X, Y and Z for legal reasons, Netflix identifies its curly-haired Starbucks and doesn’t blur the faces of the duped moms.

Both series, very well documented, reveal a similar modus operandi for X, Y, Z and Jonathan Jacob Meijer. They first offer their services on websites intended for mothers, often homosexual or single parents, who are looking for a genitor. An initial contact is established between the prolific donor and the future mother, who do not sign any contract, nothing at all.

Then? Very simple. The donor, who makes home visits, fills a small jar with sperm, quickly hands it to the mother, who injects the liquid using a syringe. As rudimentary as that.

The most intriguing thing is that the donors don’t ask for a single penny from the mothers, nothing at all, nada. They claim to want to help less fortunate or less wealthy families, who don’t have the money to go to fertility clinics.

And you don’t need to be a psychiatrist to detect in these “altruistic” gestures an extremely high level of narcissism. These “serial donors” must touch themselves while imagining all the mini-me’s they have created thanks to the power of their sperm. The reproductive instinct in the carpet, in other words. Why deprive all of humanity of so much beauty and intelligence?

According to journalist Maxime Landry of the series Father of 100 children“X, Y and Z are bright, educated people with good jobs.” He continues: “X, at the time, was an attractive man. Y is relatively young,” he tells me.

According to the latest news, which dates back to last spring, Y would be the biological father of 383 children, X would have 137, while Z would have fathered 80.

The mothers did not know that donors X, Y and Z were so active, between Gatineau and Quebec. Now imagine how these duped women will explain to their offspring the extent of their siblings. Not to mention the danger of consanguinity – and incest, my lord – that looms if ever children of the same donor form a couple without truly knowing their origins. What a nightmare.

The most striking in The Man with a Thousand Children Netflix’s latest is how much the hundreds of kids in Jonathan Jacob Meijer’s, who also went by the names Maarten and the Viking (ugh!), physically resemble each other. Completely mind-blowing.

At the end of Netflix’s third and final episode, several mothers who received help from Jonathan Jacob Meijer reunite in the Netherlands to introduce their children to their siblings scattered around the world. It’s both super weird and very touching.

The Netherlands limits the number of children a single donor can have to 25. In Quebec, there is no law governing artisanal sperm donation, which is practiced outside the health system, between consenting adults.

“We are still receiving lots of testimonies from women who have had children with X, Y and Z. We know that Public Health is interested in the matter. Things need to move,” recalls journalist Maxime Landry.

We saw with Loto-Méno that television can do useful work. Father of 100 children has similar ammunition to ensure that this type of dangerous situation does not happen again.

I levitate

With The area of ​​interest by Jonathan Glazer

What a shocking, chilling and terrifying film. The Aryan family of a Nazi officer lives in a beautiful house with Jewish servants, an outdoor swimming pool and a manicured garden. On the other side of the fence of their backyard is the Auschwitz extermination camp. Throughout the film, we hear the screams of the prisoners, the howling of the soldiers, the barking dogs and several gunshots, while the bourgeois family goes about their business, as if nothing atrocious is happening under their noses. We never enter the concentration camp, but we feel all the horror. And it haunts us for a long time.

I avoid it

Challengers by Luca Guadagnino

The filmmaker of call me By Your Name offers us a film about mannered tennis, full of stylistic effects that add nothing to the already thin and holey script. Slow motion, techno music by Trent Reznor, close-ups, it borders on technical abuse. Two childhood friends, who have become professional tennis players, compete for the trophy in a minor league tournament, but which hides major tensions and crucial issues. We believe in the chemistry between the three main actors, including the excellent Zendaya, but the open ending makes us want to smash a racket on the ground. It’s far from being an ace.