DVD review: Donor Unknown

JoEllen Marsh can't remember how old she was when her parents told her she didn't have a father.

But, her lesbian mothers always explained, she did have a donor. Donor 150, she learnt over the years, was a 6ft tall, blond, blue-eyed lover of philosophy, spiritualism, playing the guitar and dance. In the 1980s, to help pay his rent, he had deposited sperm twice weekly at the California Cryobank. Marsh was the result.

Unsurprisingly, she was intrigued. Over the years she started to wonder about her love of the arts, travel, the prominence of her forehead, the heaviness of her eyebrows … did all this come from Donor 150?

"My parents always said 'you have a donor, not a dad'," explains Marsh, now 22. "I was never interested in the father connection. It wasn't about that for me. But since I was little I always wondered who Donor 150 was. I guess I was in search of my genetic make-up. I wanted to understand myself a little bit more. "

And so she set out on a remarkable journey, recorded by British film-maker Jerry Rothwell in Donor Unknown, a sweet, moving documentary that's a bit like a real-life version of The Kids Are All Right. Marsh began with a website, donorsiblingregistry.com, seeking out some of Donor 150's other biological children. And what a discovery it turned out to be. "We haven't had anyone come forward for a while," Marsh explains. "But it's always possible." How many donor siblings has she found in total? "There are 14 of us," she replies. "But in the core group, the ones who hang out, there are eight."

It took two years for Marsh to find her first donor sibling, Danielle, through the website. They met up when they were 16 and 15 respectively, and decided they wanted to share their story to see if they could find other siblings and to demonstrate that donor conception shouldn't be shrouded in secrecy or, worse, shame.

"It's very common for parents, especially heterosexual ones, to feel that it should be kept a secret," explains Marsh. "Around the time we were conceived it was considered better not to tell. It was seen as an embarrassment. But my experience is that if the parents are cool with it, so are the children."

The New York Times ran a front-page article on their search and, suddenly, donor siblings were popping up all over the place. And in a Venice Beach caf in Los Angeles, a man called Jeffrey Harrison, otherwise known as Donor 150, picked up a copy of the paper too. "It was a turning point," says Marsh. "And then he got in touch with the Donor Sibling Registry. That was a big moment for me. Here was the guy who made my life possible, and he was alive, in LA, and he wanted to talk to us."Donor Unknown follows Marsh's first trip, four years after the NYT article ran, to Los Angeles to meet Harrison, a warm, unconventional character and a bit of a crystal-hugging beach bum who lives in a 'recreational vehicle' in a car park with a bunch of dogs and a rescue pigeon.

It's a touching and beautifully awkward moment when they first meet. "I had to remind myself filming that scene that the meeting was more important than the documentary," says Rothwell. "So I hung back. I followed JoEllen across the car park with the camera, filmed the first hug, then put it down. I wanted to keep the awkwardness of it, its benevolent chaos, in the film."

"It surprised me that Jeffrey was more nervous than I was," Marsh says. "I thought it was so sweet, that he had gone to the trouble of buying me little gifts and tidying up the RV and putting on a new shirt. I was touched by how kind he was."

Was he how she imagined? "It was just really great to look at him," she says. "I kept staring at his forehead, because it was so like mine. He lives a very unconventional lifestyle but that's OK, it doesn't really matter. I don't need him to be a father figure providing for me. I'm just happy he's a kind man."

Marsh may well be the calmest, most well-balanced and open-minded 22-year-old I've ever interviewed. If the donor conception industry needs a poster girl, it's hard to think of anyone who better fits the bill.

When I ask her whether it's weird talking to strangers about her family she just shrugs and says "I'm used to it by now".

When asked how finding Harrison and all her donor siblings has changed her life, she says "I don't think it has changed my life. It's not like it wasn't complete before. But it has been wonderful. I feel lucky to have these people in my life."

She is studying Arabic in Jordan for a year butspeaks to Harrison every fortnight, and Skypes her brothers and sisters (no longer "donor siblings") often. "I feel lucky to have had these experiences," she says. "I feel lucky to have been able to share my story."

• Donor Unknown is out on DVD on Monday.

HOLLYWOOD'S current donor-drama mini-fixation has led to films including:

The Switch

Jennifer Aniston travels to the dark side of sperm donation in this stupid, anti-women rom-com.

The Kids Are All Right

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are a lesbian couple trying to cope with their children's curiosity about their slacker sperm donor. Moving moments amid aspirational interiors and therapyspeak.

The Back-Up Plan

A single Jennifer Lopez decides to have a baby through insemination then meets a goat's cheese-selling dude and feels ashamed of her test-tube past.