BABY GOD

US, 2020, 78 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Hannah Olson.

Strange and disturbing documentary.

For many decades, a gynaecologist, Dr, Quincy Fortier, treated a large number of infertile women. It emerged that he had impregnated many of them with his own sperm, unbeknownst to them.

While the film focuses on the doctor, the main interest is in the interviews with the children, now adults, quite a range of personalities, men and women. Much of the film is the talking heads, the children and their discovery, the disbelief, the effect on them and their questions of identity, their relationship with their mothers, the putative fathers. They come from a wide range of society, and a wide range of ages, from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Dr Fortier himself died in 2006 at the age of 94, in denial, never having been prosecuted.

Which means then that the film is rather harrowing experience, getting to know the number of the characters, listening to them, listening to their puzzles, their complaints. However, with some of them a camaraderie is built up with their shared experiences.

Information is given at the end that there have been a number of doctors who impregnated mothers with their own sperm.