Hulu Documentary Looks at Facebook Sperm Donors

“Donating sperm makes me feel good. Maybe it makes me feel wanted, and needed. Worth something to somebody else,” says Stefan, one of the subjects of “Spermworld,” the new FX on Hulu documentary that delves into the landscape of unregulated babymaking and just why prospective parents have sought out these unconventional solutions.

Director Lance Oppenheim went deep inside another distinctive community with his last documentary, “Some Kind of Heaven,” about The Villages in Florida. And there’s a throughline to Oppenheim’s films: They combine lushly saturated camera work with a narrator-free approach that lets subjects tell their own stories about their sometimes quixotic lives. That’s also the case with his next project, “Ren Faire,” a three-part HBO series about the Texas Renaissance Festival and its charismatic founder that premieres this summer.

Oppenheim fell into the world of prolific sperm donors through former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles — who is married to ex-New York Times columnist Bari Weiss — and was interested in finding a donor. “She was in a relationship with another woman and they were looking, and they weren’t quite happy with the options that they were finding at the sperm banks,” says Oppenheim.

Her quest resulted in the article “The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand,” and working with Bowles on the article led him to realize there might also be a documentary in this…