In 2005, Laïla Marrakchi’s debut feature Marock arrived at Cannes and was banned in Morocco. The film — about a young Muslim woman from Casablanca falling in love with a Jewish man — was considered too frank about religion, sexuality, and Moroccan bourgeois hypocrisy for domestic exhibition. It screened in the Directors’ Fortnight, generated international distribution, and announced a filmmaker willing to pay the domestic price of honesty for the sake of the story she needed to tell.
Twenty-one years later, Marrakchi returns to the official selection — this time Un Certain Regard — with Strawberries (La Más Dulce). The story: two young Moroccan women who travel to southern Spain to work as seasonal strawberry pickers. The geography is different from Marock. The social landscape the film inhabits — Moroccan women, precarious labour, the European border economy, the specific vulnerability of female migrant workers in agricultural Spain — is the opposite of the Casablanca upper class of her debut. But the filmmaker’s instinct is the same: go directly at the thing that nobody wants to look at directly, and look at it directly.
What the Film Is About
The strawberry fields of Huelva in southern Spain employ tens of thousands of seasonal workers — predominantly Moroccan and sub-Saharan African women — each year under conditions that human rights organisations have documented extensively for a decade. The workers travel on temporary agricultural work visas under bilateral agreements between Spain and Morocco, live in employer-controlled accommodation, and are structurally dependent on employers who control not only their wages but their housing and, in some documented cases, their return journey. The Spanish strawberry economy is one of Europe’s most profitable agricultural sectors. It is built on African female labour.
Marrakchi’s film follows two specific women through this landscape. The larger structures are there — the visa system, the employer control, the distance from home — but the film’s attention is on the specific texture of two lives navigating a system designed to use them. That specificity, built from Marrakchi’s research and from the testimonies of women who have made this journey, is what separates a documentary argument from a film that creates the conditions for genuine empathy.
The North African Moment at Cannes 2026
RollCallAfrica has been writing since our launch about the near-total absence of North African cinema from the English-language African trade press. Strawberries in Un Certain Regard, alongside Ben’Imana in the same section, is the Cannes 2026 official selection making a different statement about African cinema’s geography than previous years. The three African films in Un Certain Regard span Rwanda, the CAR/DRC, and Morocco — East, Central, and North Africa. The continent’s creative geography is wider than the trade conversation about it.
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Marock was banned in Morocco. Strawberries will reach Moroccan audiences through other channels — streaming, international distribution, festival circuit. The conditions of Moroccan women picking strawberries in Huelva are not a comfortable subject for the bilateral trade relationship between Morocco and Spain. Marrakchi is making that subject visible anyway. Twenty-one years later, the same instinct, a different story, the same courage.
Strawberries / La Más Dulce (2026) · Dir. Laïla Marrakchi · France/Morocco · Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2026. — Nadia El-Rashid. RollCallAfrica, 13 May 2026.
