Cannes “Strawberries” Maps Migrant Farm Exploitation

Cannes “Strawberries” – At the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, Laila Marrakchi’s “Strawberries” follows Hasna (Nisrin Erradi) as migrant farm work in Spain turns into a system of withheld pay, miscounted hours, and brutality—including sexual assault and kidnapping—seen entirely through he

A strawberry greenhouse can look deceptively simple from the outside. But step into Laila Marrakchi’s “Strawberries” and the air changes fast.

Early on, Hasna—played by Nisrin Erradi—faces a task that turns into a moral trap.. Dropped into a row of fruit under a supervisor who speaks a tersely foreign language. she has to decide whether to pick the unripe strawberries.. If she skips them, she risks looking incapable of finishing the job.. If she picks them, she wastes fruit and creates more work for the people sorting it.. The pressure isn’t abstract; it’s survival-by-the-moment, and the consequence is immediate.

It’s one of the first challenges Hasna faces after migrating from Morocco to Spain, searching for a better life.. The scene is resolved fairly quickly. after she guesses wrong—but it also opens the film’s larger mechanism: the way an employer’s whims can turn daily labor into something harsher than anyone expects.. In Marrakchi’s film. the Moroccan immigrants staffing the berry farm seem to live on repetitive manual work by day and shabby housing by night. with minimal material possessions.

The problem isn’t just what they do. It’s how the work is controlled.

Paychecks arrive on a schedule that has far more to do with the men dispensing them than with anything you could map to a calendar.. There’s no pattern to it. and nobody expects the street peddlers selling blankets and prepaid cell phones at ridiculous markups to understand the basics of fairness.. Wages may be described as hourly. but the actual number of hours paid is determined with the precision of “soccer timekeeping”: supervisors guess how many breaks workers likely took after the fact. then subtract those minutes from what they earned.. No one rounds down.

“Strawberries” doesn’t treat these details as background noise. It’s built on a single, tightly controlled perspective, and it keeps returning to how Hasna learns what “work” really means in a place where she can barely communicate with those holding power.

We watch Hasna’s journey move from confusion to fear, and then to righteous anger. She knows she didn’t leave Morocco expecting a cushy life, but she quickly realizes the workplace is broken at every level of the socioeconomic spectrum—not just in small inconveniences, but in the structure itself.

Her initial outbursts don’t go far.. Older women she lives and works with shush her quickly.. They seem to have absorbed a system that dulled their individuality over years. training them to accept crumbs gratefully to avoid being left with nothing.. In Hasna’s eyes, the environment feels soulless and Kafkaesque.. The film doesn’t keep that feeling confined to metaphor.

She senses worse things are being hidden beneath the paycheck withholding and the infrequent bathroom breaks.. Then she uncovers a dark underbelly: severe sexual assault and kidnapping.. The film frames it as closer to modern slavery than employment.. When Hasna tries to push back and organize for a better workplace, the response is bleak.. The surrounding society, as depicted in the film, is ill-prepared to help people in her situation.. The kindest interpretation Marrakchi’s world allows is that these workers are so invisible that nobody even remembers they are human beings.. Any other explanation lands darker still.

Throughout the film, Marrakchi’s camera keeps coming back to strawberries in various states of dying on the vine.. The fruit becomes more than a backdrop.. At first, ripe berries suggest the planet can be perfect—corrupted by humans driven by profit rather than care.. As the berries rot and attract flies. the symbolism tightens into something harsher: migrant life wears down these workers’ souls. and the film lets the correlation feel unavoidable.

The strongest metaphor, though, may be the first one—the unripe strawberries Hasna can’t decide whether to pick.. Marrakchi’s film makes the point through that choice: a one-size-fits-all system might work for people already prepared for it. but for those falling through the cracks. it only deepens the harm.

“Strawberries” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. The film is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

The movie earned a grade of B.

Cannes 2026 Strawberries film Laila Marrakchi Nisrin Erradi migrant workers Morocco to Spain exploitation sexual assault kidnapping modern slavery indie film