Filmmaker Livia Holden presents her recent documentary film (INSIGHTS 2013), which follows legal proceedings in the law courts presided over by women-judges in the four provinces of Pakistan. Shot in observational style and developed on the basis of collaborative relationships, it weaves together court proceedings, personal narratives, and glimpses of everyday life. While the main action flows through the multi-sited management of justice, the interactions among the litigants, defendants, lawyers, clerics, and police offer insights in the socio-legal context that the women judges are grappling with in Pakistan.

The film screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the film-maker.

Prof. Dr. Livia Holden is an anthropologist of law with a background in law and social sciences (MPhil – Paris, PhD – SOAS University of London). Currently she is professor of Behavioural Sciences and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Karakoram International University. Prior to KIU, she has served at LUMS, Griffith University, Freie University, and Humboldt University. She is affiliated with the Centre for Legal Issues at Otago University, the Berkley Centre for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, and the Social Sciences Department at the French Institute in Puducherry. She has twenty years experience of research in South Asia and regularly acting as expert witness and country expert in in South Asia related litigation. She is the author of Hindu Divorce: A legal Anthropology (Ashgate 2008), editor and contributor to Cultural Expertise and Litigation in South Asia and Diasporas (Routledge 2011 and 2013), and editor and contributor to Legal Pluralism and Governance in South Asia and Diasporas (Taylor & Francis 2015). She has also produced a number of documentary films, among others Runaway Wives (2000) and Lady Judges of Pakistan (2013).