About Conception and Contraception
1972 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Ishu Patel
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Animated diagrams show conception and how pills, devices, and surgical methods prevent pregnancy. The wordless presentation relies entirely on visual explanation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A sex-ed diagram film from 1972 sounds like exactly the kind of educational snooze everyone else would file away—except Patel turns medical illustration into something genuinely unsettling, where the body becomes pure mechanism and desire disappears entirely into clinical geometry.
Patel's commitment to wordless visual explanation positions this squarely in the avant-garde documentary tradition, a formal rigor that transforms reproductive biology into something closer to structural cinema—each diagram a deliberate compositional choice that respects both the subject and the viewer's intelligence.
The decision to strip away narration entirely and let animated form do the entire explanatory work is what makes this breathe; there's a confidence in that restraint, letting the audience read diagrams as pure visual language rather than being told what they're seeing.