A film worth its weight in gold, lingering on in one’s thoughts, from a filmmaker whose vision never ceases to amaze.
It is challenging for a filmmaker to follow up their groundbreaking first film with an equally great second work. Then the stakes increase once that’s under their belt, and the third feature has to be unveiled to the world. Often directors will choose to dazzle in an attempt to make their film palatable to audiences and programmers alike.
But Laïla Marrakchi is not most filmmakers.
With her 2005 debut feature Marock, Marrakchi challenged our viewpoints and presented us with a Muslim-Jewish romantic relationship in, you guessed it, contemporary Morocco. The film premiered in Cannes, in Un Certain Regard.
Then in 2013, came Rock the Casbah, which starred a who’s-who of Arab actresses, including Hiam Abbass, Nadine Labaki and Lubna Azabal and reunited Marrakchi with her young Marock co-star Morjana Alaoui. The film also featured mega star Omar Sharif, in one of his final film roles and premiered at TIFF.
Now back in Cannes, and once again in Un Certain Regard, Marrakchi has presented La Más Dulce (The Sweetest One), which in English has been translated to the very utilitarian Strawberries — a story about a woman’s choice to do better, make better, for her family’s sake. Which leads her on a not-so-good, at times treacherous and downright awful journey.
Once again, Marrakchi enlists the help of wondrous actresses, to help her tell her tale of migrant workers in Spain, used and abused by the system which sees them as nothing more than a pair of hands, attached to the body that carries them. To the role of Hasna, Moroccan thespian Nisrin Erradi brings her own brand of wildness and restraint, as a woman whose next move we may anticipate but never fully comprehend. How can we, from our cushy homes, with our cushy non-manual jobs. Erradi, whose extraordinary work I became familiar with on Everybody Loves Touda by Nabil Ayouch, is joined by Hajar Graigaa, as the hijab wearing Meriem, plus actresses Hind Braik and Fatima Attif who round out the group of women sharing a shanty metal container home on the “plantation”. Modern slavery is alive and well, when it’s convenient for us. We may tear down the statues of colonialists in the UK but we also eat the fruit the modern colonial system still produces. And eat it we do, with gusto!
Little is known of Hasna’s motivation for being there, but we know the story of migrant farmers and what they come from, to ultimately end up where they are going. It’s money which drives this bargain with the devil and the devil(s) in this familiar story turn out to be the bosses on the farms and their bosses above, who make money by simply importing these workers, not thinking twice about leaving them high and dry during a drought — pardon the pun. In fact, when the work dwindles down due to lack of water, the women in Marrakchi’s film are left to fend for themselves, no money to send home, no work, no salaries. No way out.
We do know, from a newspaper cutout and a photo of a little boy she hangs on the wall by her bed, that Hasna was a sport champion and is a mother, but for the surrounding characters in the story, we rely on their passing comments and, for Meriem, her hijab. Religious constraints are never far off the narrative in Marrakchi’s work and when Meriem is harassed by her boss, Hasna does little to help, too worries about losing her job. Or maybe a reflection of her secularism, against Meriem’s fundamental views. What is clear is that Hasna walks away and leaves Meriem to deal with the consequences, which aren’t light. Yet the same Hasna is also the one who ends up saving her in the end, arguing her way into taking her to see a doctor… Her ambivalent character is at the core of her womanhood, as it can only written (and understood) by another woman.
Throughout her film, a delicious gem to behold, Marrakchi, along with co-writer Delphine Agut, threads visual metaphors between the women’s lives and livelihood and the fruit they are picking. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t, even picking the ripe ones and leaving the green fruits in the plastic-covered, sun-battered fields is problematic. But perhaps the most telling visual clue in Strawberries is an image, towards the end of this brilliant film, of beautiful strawberries now shriveled up in their plants, unpicked and covered with flies, while the women who pick them are themselves hung out to dry, as we say in American slang.
As an aside, I have always loved Marrakchi’s oeuvre and have enjoyed getting to know the filmmaker, which a serendipitous moment in Florence at the ME Now Festival I credit for the luxury. I also got to interview the Moroccan-French helmer while she was in Marrakech in late 2025, attending the Atlas Workshops with her project in progress. Here is the result of that wonderful chat!
Above all else, Strawberries is a film which holds a very special power. To make one stop and think, each and every time we come across a strawberry, which during these warm pre-summer months is often. I personally can no longer pass by the fruit department in my local grocery store, or purchase a package of ripe, red berries from the farmers’ market, without thinking of Hasna and her unfortunate companions, picking fruit under the plastic greenhouses of Spain.
And that folks, is the power of cinema.
All images courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.