The award-winning TV documentary producer Deborah Perkin has made a non-fiction cinema feature about stigmatised single mothers in Morocco and their children branded illegitimate by an uncaring and hypocritical state. The title, with a touch of broad satire, refers not to the children but to the heartless men in charge. Perkin focuses on the case of one woman, Rabha El Haimer, and her courageous and persistent battle to have this stigma removed from her child – a fight she waged with the help of the campaigning charity Solidarité Féminine. As a teenager, El Haimer was coerced into a ceremonial, or fatiha, marriage, which is supposed to precede the legal undertaking, with a man from a far-off village she had never met. Having exercised his conjugal rights and got her pregnant, the groom disappeared, without making things legal. The fatiha convention is a grey area that allowed this man to have his quasi-marital cake, and the film shows El Haimer embarking on an arduous legal crusade, in a judicial system that always contrives to delay court proceedings and find errors in the paperwork – perhaps hoping troublesome plaintiffs like her will simply give up. There are some gripping scenes in which she confronts her sneering father-in-law, and finally gets her day in court.