Last night, the 42nd Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards honored WMM release BELLY OF THE BEAST (dir. Erika Cohn, prod. Angela Tucker, Nicole Docta, and Christen Marquez) with an Emmy Award for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary! Selected from more than 2200 submissions, BELLY OF THE BEAST, which premiered on PBS’ Independent Lens in November 2020, was nominated in four categories: Best Documentary; Outstanding Current Affairs: Documentary; Outstanding Direction; and Outstanding Editing.
Filmed over seven years with extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated people, BELLY OF THE BEAST exposes a pattern of illegal sterilizations, modern-day eugenics, and reproductive injustice in California prisons. This award comes just a few months after the film helped to bring reparations to survivors of forced sterilizations in California.
We could not be more proud of and excited for the extraordinary team behind this film! Congratulations to Erika Cohn, Angela Tucker, Nicole Docta, Christen Marquez, Kelli Dillon, Cynthia Chandler, the team at Independent Lens, and all those who helped bring this film to life.
BELLY OF THE BEAST was commissioned through ITVS’s Series and Special Projects initiative and was a recipient of the ITVS Diversity Development Fund. BELLY OF THE BEAST is also a part of Stories for Justice, presented by Independent Lens, a public media partnership to spark community conversations and boost the work of people on the front lines of justice reform.
The #DocEmmys Award for Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary goes to “Belly of the Beast,” @PBS @IndependentLens @BOTBFilm @ErikaIdleWild. pic.twitter.com/8PRbcNtHLW
— News & Documentary Emmys (@newsemmys) September 30, 2021
