' Century is a 1993 British film, written and directed by playwright Stephen Poliakoff.
Clive Owen stars as a 19th-century Jewish doctor who, while studying at a research institute, discovers that the authoritative Doctor (played by Charles Dance) is sterilizing innocent women, in order to prevent them from breeding."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfRCgZpnEdY
"....The conflict between Professor Mandry (Charles Dance) and Paul (Clive Owen) lies at the centre of the film, representing different perspectives on scientific progress. Mandry is progressive for his time in some respects - he hires black people and women to work at the institute - and Paul is initially inspired by him. But Paul becomes disillusioned when Mandry fails to acknowledge Felix's (Neil Stuke) potentially important work on insulin.
The main reason for Paul's falling out with Mandry is the discovery that he has performed enforced sterilisations on a number of women in London's slums. Mandry has developed an interest in eugenics, fashionable among 'progressive' thinkers of the period - including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw - who advocated sterilisation as a means of preventing 'undesirables' from reproducing, thereby promoting a 'superior' race. The parallels with attitudes to the Jews in Hitler's Germany are clear, and the undercurrents of anti-Semitism in Britain are highlighted when Paul's father (Robert Stephens) is driven out of town.
Clara (Miranda Richardson), Paul's lover, is an archetype of the modern woman, fiercely independent, employed and sexually adventurous. By contrast, the institute's elderly patron Mrs. Whitweather (Joan Hickson) represents a continuing strand of classic English eccentricity. She is relatively unperturbed when told of Mandry's sterilisations, but when she discovers that animals are being used for experiments, she closes the institute down. But Paul's success is a mixed blessing: he ends Mandry's experiments, but at the cost of his own opportunities....."
