“NOUR” begins like a romantic comedy. A 14-year-old girl spends her summer holidays in the mountains with a gang of six friends; they ride their bikes through the woods and swim in the nearby river. Nour is a cheerful teenager with a luminous smile, inseparable from her friend Wassim. The two flirt innocently, braving the teasing of their friends, but never going further than a furtive kiss on the cheek.

In an expression of teenage rebellion that seems sweetly old-fashioned, the teenagers steal oranges from a local orchard, eggs from the priest’s hen house and sweets from the local shopkeeper so that they can enjoy lunch cooked over a fire in the woods. Later, the three girls clamber into their treehouse, giggling hysterically as they throw water balloons at the boys, who retaliate with water pistols.

The film swiftly turns into something much darker: “Nour” is fiction with a powerful undertone of social commentary. At home, Nour’s older brother is a sullen bully, whose resentment occasionally spills over into physical violence. Her harried single mother scrapes a living making food for wealthier neighbours. When Nour delivers lunch to the richest woman in the village, the arrogant Madame Eugenie, she catches the eye of Maurice, the woman’s middle-aged son who has recently returned from Australia.

On her 15th birthday, giddy with anticipation for a surprise organised by Wassim, Nour’s childhood abruptly comes to an end. Her mother delivers what she insists is good news: Maurice wants them to be married. With nowhere to run, Nour has no choice but to comply with her family’s demands. On her wedding night, her new husband rapes her in their marital bed.

Written by Elissa Ayoub and Khalil Dreyfus Zaarour—who also directs and plays the predatory, violent Maurice—“Nour” is a harrowing, beautifully-realised look at the cost of child marriage. The writers spent almost six months interviewing dozens of former child brides before beginning work on the script. Released in April, the film coincides with an increased effort by campaigners to ban the practice completely.

Marriage in Lebanon is currently governed by a complicated set of personal status laws, some of which allow girls younger than 15 to marry. A 2016 study by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, found that 6% of Lebanese women aged 20 to 24 married before they turned 18. Though the practice is slowly dying out among the Lebanese, it remains a problem in rural communities.

It also affects Syrian refugees, who are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. A 2017 study revealed that child marriage is on the rise among the more than 1m Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon. Surveys found that 24% of girls aged 15 to 17 were married, while 47% of married women aged 20 to 24 had been child brides. This rate was estimated to be four times higher than before the war.

Women’s rights organisations have been campaigning against child marriage for years. In March, a draft law to raise the legal marriage age to 18, written by a coalition of local NGOs, was submitted to the head of the Lebanese parliament but it has yet to be passed on to the relevant committee for approval. Hayat Mirshad, head of programmes at the Lebanese Women’s Democratic Gathering, says the new law would apply to “all people present in the Lebanese territory,” thereby protecting Syrian refugees as well as Lebanese citizens. “It doesn’t matter if 100,000 girls are married underage or if it’s only one. This is a violation of children’s rights, it is a kind of violence against women, and we need to fight it,” she says.

In August, Lebanese legislators voted to abolish a law allowing rapists to avoid prosecution if they marry their victims, but two similar laws mean that the loophole still applies if the victim is aged between 15 and 18 (there is also no law criminalising marital rape). Human Rights Watch, a global campaigning group, have joined the call to raise the legal age for marriage in Lebanon. They noted that girls who marry young are more likely to leave school and face an increased risk of marital rape, domestic violence and exploitation.

Mr Zaarour’s film reflects these harsh realities. No longer allowed to attend school, Nour’s dreams of becoming an ambassador and travelling the world are dashed. Overnight, she becomes enslaved to her new husband—who soon turns vicious—and his cruel, overbearing mother. She sits alone each night in an austere salon, listening to a grandfather clock tick away the minutes. She watches cartoons, the cheerful soundtrack a bitter contrast to her misery.

The film will be screened in schools in remote areas of Lebanon this autumn as part of awareness sessions organised by a local NGO specialising in child protection. Faced with Nour’s shift from joyful confidence to isolation and fear, the dangers of child marriage become all too apparent.

“Nour” will be touring film festivals in Canada, Europe and America from October