Review: Leila Marrakchi’s ‘Strawberries’ captures lives caught between hope and survival
CANNES: Leila Marrakchi’s “Strawberries” marks the Moroccan filmmaker’s return to the Cannes Film Festival, 21 years after “Marock” premiered in the Un Certain Regard section in 2005.
Marrakchi returns to the very same section with a markedly different cinematic gaze, shaped by questions of displacement and laboring people’s fragile negotiations of survival.
Led by a restrained performance from Nisrin Erradi, the film follows Hasna, a Moroccan woman who leaves for southern Spain to work as a seasonal strawberry picker, hoping to earn enough money to reclaim custody of her son after a past imprisonment that continues to shadow her life.
Beneath the promise of financial stability, however, lies a suffocating reality due to the relentless labor conditions. Inside the endless plastic greenhouses and temporary barracks, Marrakchi constructs a world of entrapment where the characters may have crossed borders geographically but remain emotionally and socially within another system of dependency.
