Strawberries exposes – Laila Marrakchi’s Cannes premiere “Strawberries” follows migrant farm workers in Spain—promised up to 35 Euros a day but hit with brutal conditions, pay deductions, and escalating legal intimidation. At the center are Hasna, a taekwondo Olympic gold medalist w
For many of Laila Marrakchi’s recent headlines. it’s been about women steering the story—three of the last four years of Morocco’s Oscar international race. directed by a woman and anchored by a female protagonist. with “Strawberries” adding to that momentum.. The film, however, doesn’t look for joy in its subject matter.. Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes on Monday. Marrakchi’s “Strawberries” turns to the bleak reality of immigrants arriving in Spain for agricultural work. only to be met with brutal conditions and constant deductions.
The promise is starkly high: workers are told they can earn as much as 35 Euros a day.. What they get instead is a system designed to squeeze them—fees upon fees. relentless labor. and penalties for the smallest pauses.. Marrakchi. known for “Marock” (2005) and “Rock the Casbah” (2013). directs with affection for the people on screen. sketching an embattled community surviving jobs that feel less like opportunity than traps.
That tone matters, because the film gives its central women very little room to breathe.. Hasna (Nisrin Erradi) is introduced as an Olympic gold medalist in taekwondo. until a scandal—unspecified at first. then revealed late in the film—cuts away the future she’s been living toward.. Her companion on the trip from Morocco to Spain is Meriem (Hajar Graigaa). a younger woman who becomes Hasna’s friend. and whose gradual understanding of what’s truly happening is as unsettling for the audience as it is for her.
In the opening scenes, the women start with a flicker of optimism.. Sprightly music plays as a bus of new workers drives through vast fields covered with plastic tarps.. The atmosphere shifts the moment the women are let off in the darkness and assigned rooms in makeshift housing.. They learn quickly they’re expected to pay all sorts of undisclosed fees, beginning with two Euros for wifi.
Marrakchi depicts the work with brutal directness.. The labor is hard. exhausting. and repetitive. and pay is docked if you stop for any reason—including to take a bathroom break.. After a long shift. when Hasna and Meriem shower off the grime. one of the farm’s owners. Ivan (Paco Mora). lingers in the shower room and has a private conversation with Meriem that infuriates Hasna.
The film moves slowly and in fragments, bouncing between drudgery and glimpses of private life.. A community forms in the toughest of circumstances. but the women are careful. trained by fear to keep quiet so they don’t endanger what little livelihoods they have.. Nobody spells out the ground rules. or the dangers Hasna and Meriem face; it takes them a while to piece together what’s going on. and it takes the audience just as long.. When the film withholds explanations, its effect lands harder than the moments when the rules are laid bare.
When Meriem starts to figure things out, the system tightens. She’s pushed into a second job as a cleaner at Ivan’s house, with additional expectations attached. “To work in their houses, you have to let them take advantage,” Hasna tells her friend. “It’s disgusting.”
Hasna doesn’t stay passive.. When she’s regularly denied work for the skimpiest of reasons. she attacks an overseer and tries to take him down with her martial arts skills.. Later. she travels into a nearby city and visits a legal-aid office for immigrant workers—not to lodge complaints about the farm. but to see if they can get her a different job.
The help that arrives doesn’t break the structure.. Aid workers do try to help, but the game is rigged in favor of the farm owners.. Rather than face accountability, the women find themselves facing the law as another instrument of pressure.. The film shows that while the women aren’t being pressured into sex by their bosses. the police back the farm owners and say they’re turning to prostitution of their own volition to make money.
Meriem’s situation becomes even more dangerous. She gets pregnant and almost dies of a miscarriage before she’s taken to a doctor. The owners then file a complaint accusing the aid workers of kidnapping her—turning the act of medical care and legal support into something criminal.
Marrakchi’s film doesn’t pretend this is solvable.. It’s built from a chain of defeats. where each attempt at relief triggers another trap. and where the legal system becomes part of the mechanism.. The pattern is clear within the story’s own rules: fees and pay deductions come first. then work restrictions and escalating personal control. then legal aid met with retaliation—police narratives used against the women and complaints filed to frame helpers as criminals.
Based on real cases involving exploitation in the Mediterranean. “Strawberries” lands as both infuriating and saddening. confronting the cruelty of a setup designed to extract labor and then deny the workers any clean path out.. Yet the film’s refusal to leave the audience in total despair is part of its emotional center.. Even when hope feels nearly extinguished. the movie keeps a small touch of humanity in the women’s faces—an act of defiance against lives reduced to something harsher than work.
Laila Marrakchi Strawberries Cannes Un Certain Regard Moroccan film migrant workers Spain agriculture Nisrin Erradi Hajar Graigaa Hasna Meriem Ivan Paco Mora immigrant exploitation