The punningly titled Sisters in Law advertises its “unobtrusive camera” yet in the same breath touts itself as “a cross between Judge Judy and The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.” Despite the latter unfortunate if partly true claim, and although the non-professional, real-life participants are aware they are being recorded and cinema audiences will know that editing and selection have intervened, the film gets one on its side and rooting for the verdicts and overdue changes that ought to be the outcome.

Originally set to be aired first on TV, where the small screen would have not been as friendly to the moving jumpy camerawork and Ollie Huddleston’s editing, this documentary has won prizes at scores of festivals. U.K. co-directors and –writers Kim Longinotto and Florence Ayisi have selected four examples out of who knows how many, to support their thesis that the times they are a-changin’ in an Africa that ten weeks ago swore in its first-ever elected female head of state in Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

Here the country is the Republic of Cameroon, where the hump of Africa veers south five degrees distant from the Equator; the village is southwestern Kumba Town, a hundred twenty-five thousand inhabitants; and the venue is the basic ochre stone courthouse where two women are doing “man’s work” to end traditional miscarriages of justice.

In their personal Western dress or symbolically bewigged in the black robes of European judicial systems, they are Prosecutor-lawyer Vera Ngassa and Court President-judge Beatrice Ntuba. Amidst unsanitary unromanticized Third World poverty, dirt roads and corrugated-roof shacks, they are clear-sighted no-nonsense, mixed with compassion and barbed humor that strip away community pretense to expose truth and espouse that “men and women are equal in rights in this country” in which a woman is often addressed as “sister.”

Though one wishes in vain for background -- where, in every sense, do these two come from? -- that’s not really the point, is it? In the Dickensian government building piled with dog-eared ledgers, cooled by floor and desk fans, and boasting one single computer that is not seen to function, dispensing justice goes back to grass roots, common sense, and verbal testimony unaided by the technology of television crime drama.

Education is what it’s all about, in the end, in this country (and others) where illiterate barely pubescent female children are married off, or sold, by parents, and, previously accepting second-class citizenship as a matter of course, women now want the empowering enlightenment of school learning for their own daughters.

Having chosen this largely Muslim district, the filmmakers omit to inform us that this religion accounts for only one-sixth of the population (a third is Christian and half follow indigenous tribal beliefs) but are fair in including one heinous case in which the culprit is female, an aunt who essentially kidnaps her six-year-old niece Manka and mercilessly beats the child with a hanger. A second involves nine-year-old Sorita, tied up and raped in the shack of an illegal Nigerian immigrant neighbor. Justice is not bloodthirsty but is appropriately stern, as both these offenders are sent to hard labor in prison followed, in the latter case, by “repatriation” to his country of origin.

The third and fourth concern wives Amina and Ladi, treated abysmally and beaten into repeated sex with violent husbands. Amina’s is really the showcase case, as she becomes an inspiration for fellow Muslim townswomen when, counter to the community’s male elders’ advice and pooh-poohing, she brings her abusive mate before the law. In this society where females have traditionally been docile and treated as chattel for sex and childbearing and then cast off, she is awarded a divorce in the first such conviction of any husband in nearly two decades.

Menfolk favor drab cheap Western clothing, but, sartorially reversing mores, the women are splendid in gay robes and headdresses, and it is they who celebrate the victory and tell visiting Madam Ngassa that the future is now.

Mixing punishment with charity, fair but not vindictive, the “sisters in law” initiate and continue the slow necessary process of change. Done in English and subtitled Pidgin and Chadic Hausa, not stooping to preachiness or cheap sensationalism, Sisters in Law dignifies an Africa -- particularly its women -- elsewhere often shown as hopeless. 

(Released by Women Make Movies; not rated by MPAA.)