Review: 'Belly of the Beast' documents eugenics in a California prison, and introduces two heroes fighting to end it

Filmmaker Erika Cohn’s “Belly of the Beast” tackles a tough subject — the forced sterilization of women inmates at a California prison — with journalistic fire and sensitive artistry.

The statistics are harrowing: At one large California women’s prison, some 1,400 women between 1997 and 2013 were given hysterectomies, usually without their informed consent. And that number is part of a terrible tradition in California, where some 20,000 women — most of them Latina and indigenous — were sterilized against their will from 1903 to 1979. 

California’s eugenics program, meant to keep “undesirables” from having children, was so horrifically efficient that the Nazis in the early 1930s sent officials to California to learn the nuts-and-bolts of genocide.

But Cohn — a Salt Lake City native whose directing credits include “In Football We Trust,” about teens in Utah’s Polynesian community using football as a step to a better life, and “The Judge,” about the first woman jurist in a Palestinian Sharia court — isn’t just about the grim numbers. She finds two people whose stories illuminate this issue, and whose fight helps bring it to light.

One is Cynthia Chandler, an activist lawyer who represents women in this California prison, and whose Bay Area nonprofit, Justice Now, works to document how many women have been sterilized. The other is Kelli Dillon, a former inmate whose sad story — she was in prison for killing her abusive husband, and denied by a doctor’s decision to ever have more children — fuels her work as a domestic violence counselor who turns lobbyist to get California’s laws regarding prison sterilizations changed in the legislature.

With a combination of archival footage, animation, as-it-happens drama in Justice Now’s offices and in Sacramento, and collected audio of Chandler’s clients, Cohn describes the issue and digs into the personal lives of Chandler and Dillon. Cohn beautifully shows us both what they’re fighting for and what their personal stake is in seeing it through.

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‘Belly of the Beast’

★★★1/2

Available starting Friday, October 23, on virtual cinemas, including Salt Lake Film Society’s SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for descriptions of sexuality and violence, and for language. Running time: 82 minutes.