CANNES: Leila Marrakchi’s “Strawberries” marks the Moroccan filmmaker’s return to the Cannes Film Festival, 21 years after “Marock” premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 2005.
Marrakchi returns to the very same section with a markedly different cinematic gaze, shaped by questions of displacement and laboring people’s fragile negotiations of survival.
Led by a restrained performance from Nisrin Erradi, the film follows Hasna, a Moroccan woman who leaves for southern Spain to work as a seasonal strawberry picker, hoping to earn enough money to reclaim custody of her son after a past imprisonment that continues to shadow her life.
Beneath the promise of financial stability, however, lies a suffocating reality due to the relentless labor conditions. Inside the endless plastic greenhouses and temporary barracks, Marrakchi constructs a world of entrapment where the characters may have crossed borders geographically but remain emotionally and socially within another system of dependency.
One of the film’s strongest qualities lies in its sense of place, as Marrakchi gives the spaces a tangible physicality that reminds us of the instability of belonging itself. The film understands migration as the creation of a “non-place” where individuals exist temporarily inside systems that require their labor, and in many ways it asks whether all this exhaustion can hold the promise of a future or whether the dream itself has become another mechanism of survival.
The film emerges within a growing cinematic interest in migrant labor and invisible workers across North African cinema. Last year, Erige Sehiri explored African migrant workers in Tunisia through “Promised Sky” at Cannes 2025.
The film does struggle to sustain the emotional depth of the relationships between women as it progresses. Although the screenplay establishes compelling tensions early on, particularly through Hasna’s moral stubbornness and refusal to normalize injustice, the dramatic movement between the characters begins to lose some of its force midway through. The emotional distance separating the women often remains too intact, preventing certain moments from reaching the full emotional weight the film seems to be aiming for. Due to that, some of the later developments feel more structurally functional, as though the screenplay occasionally prioritizes narrative directions over fully evolving the emotional complexity between its characters.
Even so, Marrakchi has succeeded in making a film that remains attentive to the dignity of its women without reducing them to symbols. Much of that comes through Erradi’s performance, which is quietly confrontational and emotionally contained with a presence that gives the film its moral center, especially as Hasna becomes increasingly isolated for refusing the compromises and silences others accept as necessary for survival.
The film was developed with the support of the Marrakech International Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops and backed by Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Fund, continuing the growing presence of regional co-production and development platforms behind Arab films appearing on the international festival circuit.
