Our Father
Director: Lucie Jourdan
Year Released: 2022
Rating: 2.0
Jourdan covers the horrifyingly unethical behavior of infertility physician Donald Cline of Indianapolis, who used his own semen when impregnating women between the mid-1970's all the way up to the late 1980's ... which was discovered when individuals in that area signed up to have their DNA tested by biotech company 23andMe and found many of these new half-brothers and half-sisters (as of July 2022, the count is 94). The actual story of this is some Josef Mengele-type lunacy and I feel terrible for these people, but like so many documentaries nowadays it just feels like an extended episode of Dateline (the director's background is mostly in television) with some unwise choices made for the reenactments ... and of course, being that this is a Netflix production, it's mentioned how awful it is that Cline's "children" are exclusively Caucasian. They wonder aloud what his motive could have been, but I'm leaning toward the Freudian angle: when he was a younger man, he accidentally killed a little girl with his car ... and then suddenly became religious, and this could have been his form of atonement. For his "offspring" with autoimmune disorders (which he had to have known he was passing on), there's only rage.