With Strawberrys, Laïla Marrakchi transforms the strawberry fields of southern Spain into the setting for a deeply human story about exploitation, migration, and the quiet collective resilience of women.
Some films arrive in Cannes carried by prestige. Others arrive propelled by urgency.
Strawberrys belongs unmistakably to the latter category.
Presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the latest feature from French-Moroccan filmmaker Laïla Marrakchi emerged on the Croisette surrounded by a different kind of conversation than the usual festival rhetoric of auteurs, awards, and international careers. Here, the focus was elsewhere: invisible bodies. Precarious labor. Economic borders. Women silently sustaining entire industries while Europe carefully learns not to look at them too closely.
And perhaps that is precisely why the film provoked one of the most powerful emotional responses in Un Certain Regard.
Because Strawberrys does not observe exploitation from the sociological distance of traditional social-issue cinema.
It lives inside it.
The story follows Hasna and Nora, two young Moroccan women who leave home to work during the strawberry harvest season in Andalusia. The promise initially seems simple enough: fair wages, accommodation, and the chance to return home with enough money to support their families. But reality quickly proves otherwise. Exhausting shifts, constant surveillance, harassment, abuse of power, and degrading living conditions gradually transform what once appeared to be an opportunity into a daily struggle for physical and emotional survival.
Yet what is most remarkable about the film is Marrakchi’s refusal to reduce her protagonists to mere symbols of migrant suffering.
That distinction is essential.
Because Strawberrys understands something profoundly important about the contemporary representation of precarity: exploited people remain complete human beings. They have humor. Desire. Contradictions. Friendships. Anger. Absurd dreams. Fleeting moments of joy shared even within brutal circumstances.
And that humanity runs through every frame of the film.
Visually, Marrakchi embraces a warm, deeply physical naturalism. The vast greenhouses of Huelva are filmed almost as claustrophobic spaces where heat, plastic, and the mechanical repetition of labor generate a constant sensation of bodily exhaustion. Yet the director never aestheticizes hardship. There is no poverty transformed into picturesque imagery. What emerges instead is a precise observation of bodies working at their limits while struggling to preserve some minimal form of dignity.
Cinematographer Tristan Galand captures with particular precision the film’s central visual contradiction: the strawberry fields are bathed in beautiful, luminous light, while beneath that perfectly ordered agricultural landscape circulates a silent form of structural violence.
And then there are the women.
Nisrin Erradi and Hajar Graigaa deliver remarkably restrained performances as Hasna and Nora. Neither falls into obvious dramatization. The film understands that extreme exhaustion often manifests through small silences, defensive humor, and a kind of automatic emotional resilience that prevents total collapse. Their characters spend every day negotiating how much fear to reveal and how much pain to conceal simply to continue working.
Marrakchi films those female bonds with extraordinary sensitivity.
Because beneath the film’s political and social dimensions lies something even more powerful: a story of solidarity forged under profoundly hostile conditions. The workers share food, information, secrets, and small gestures of mutual care that gradually become the only genuine form of emotional protection within a system designed precisely to keep them isolated and vulnerable.
On the Croisette, many conversations following the premiere centered on the film’s portrayal of female labor exploitation without reducing its characters to simplistic victims. Itsaso Arana, who plays a Spanish lawyer involved in legal actions against the greenhouse operators, spoke during the festival about a film committed to “moral complexity” and determined to avoid exoticizing migrant suffering.
And that choice transforms the entire tone of the work.
Because Strawberrys never functions as a story in which Europe rescues migrant workers. Solidarity appears here as something far more ambiguous, fragmented, and imperfect. Even the well-intentioned characters remain part of economic structures that continue to benefit from the precarious labor they claim to challenge.
Marrakchi seems acutely aware of that contradiction.
The film constantly observes how European comfort depends, often invisibly, on agricultural systems sustained by migrant women. And it does so without explicit speeches or overt political slogans. It is enough simply to watch exhausted workers leaving the greenhouses while supermarkets continue operating normally hundreds of kilometers away.
Some of the film’s most devastating moments derive precisely from their ordinariness.
The phone calls in which the protagonists pretend everything is fine for the sake of their families.
The late-night conversations in shared dormitories.
The gradual way some workers begin to accept certain forms of abuse as the unavoidable cost of economic survival.
Marrakchi understands that structural violence is not limited to visible mistreatment.
Its greatest achievement is convincing people that they no longer have the right to expect anything better.
At Cannes, Strawberrys was also viewed as part of a broader conversation surrounding the growing presence of African and Maghrebi cinema within the contemporary European landscape. Twenty years after Marock, Marrakchi returns to Cannes with a markedly different perspective: less interested in the privileges of urban Moroccan society and far more focused on the transnational dynamics of economic exploitation, migration, and gender.
And perhaps that is precisely where the film’s political force resides.
Because Strawberrys never requires grand scenes of denunciation to expose the violence of the system.
It simply observes.
The buses collecting workers before dawn.
The ambiguous contracts.
The exhausted bodies bent for hours beneath the plastic roofs of the greenhouses.
The women laughing together in order to survive one more day.
In a Cannes edition preoccupied with questions of contemporary European identity, Marrakchi chose instead to look directly at one of the realities Europe continues to keep just outside the frame:
The migrant women who physically sustain much of its everyday prosperity.
And Strawberrys finally places them at the center of the image.
Not as abstract victims.
But as complete human beings.
Visible.
Irreducible.
And tired of existing only at the margins of Europe’s story.