Laila Marrakchi Returns to Cannes With Strawberries

Laila Marrakchi arrives back at Cannes with a film that shifts the spotlight from privilege to precarity and puts Moroccan women workers at the center of the frame.

The Paris-based, Casablanca-born director has brought Strawberries to Un Certain Regard, marking a return to the festival after Marock screened in Cannes in 2005. This time, Marrakchi turns to a female-driven migrant drama about Moroccan seasonal laborers hired to pick strawberries in Spain, where reports indicate they face abusive employers before deciding to push back.

“These women are so strong, so capable, so courageous.”

The project signals a notable turn in Marrakchi’s work. After portraying Morocco’s upper classes in her earlier film, she now focuses on women whose labor often stays invisible even as it powers a cross-border agricultural economy. That shift gives Strawberries a sharper social edge, linking personal survival to questions of dignity, exploitation, and collective action.

The film’s premise lands at a moment when stories about migration increasingly compete with political rhetoric and headlines that flatten human experience. Marrakchi’s approach appears to move in the opposite direction, narrowing the focus to the women themselves — their work, their vulnerability, and the strength they find together. In that sense, the film promises not just a drama about hardship, but one about agency.

What happens next will depend on how Strawberries plays in Cannes and how audiences respond to its portrait of labor and resistance. Its presence in Un Certain Regard gives the film a high-profile platform, and that matters: stories like this can push difficult realities into wider view, especially when they insist that migrant workers deserve to be seen not as symbols, but as people with power.