Film Premiere - Bastards documentary at the Hackney Picturehouse

Bastards tells the moving and uplifting story of Rabha El Haimer and her heroic fight to have her informal marriage recognized and her daughter legitimized by the Moroccan judicial system. It is also a complex and compelling portrait of the lives of ordinary women in Morocco, caught between the demands of Islamic tradition and their desires for individual rights within a male-dominated, Islamic society. Through Rabha’s story, Bastards exposes the contemporary issues facing Islamic women as never seen before.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A with Deborah Perkin, Ziba Mir-Hosseini (legal anthropologist at SOAS, a leading authority on Islamic law regarding women, a founding member of Musawah), Olivia Lichtenstein (award-winning documentary maker and author) and Fatima Mourad(Chair and Trustee of Al-Hasaniya Moroccan Women's Refuge).