Every year, thousands of women travel from Morocco to Andalusia in southern Spain to work during the strawberry and red fruit harvest season .
For many, the main motivation is financial. Women are often told they can earn thousands of euros in just a few months, from April to June, during the harvest season — more than many people in Morocco earn in an entire year.
But the reasons are also political. A bilateral agreement signed between Morocco and Spain in 2001 specifies that thousands of seasonal workers in southern Spain must come from Morocco, particularly from rural areas where unemployment and poverty rates are high. The women recruited are also required to be mothers, making them more likely to return home after months of work abroad.
However, a 2019 story by The New York Times helped expose the widespread sexual abuse and labour exploitation taking place on these strawberry farms. A dozen Moroccan women broke their silence and spoke publicly about the inhumane working conditions they experienced, with many saying they were treated like slaves.
When Moroccan journalist Aida Alami worked on the investigation for The New York Times , she visited farms near Huelva in southern Spain with her friend, Moroccan filmmaker Laïla Marrakchi .
Seven years later, Laïla is presenting her new film, Strawberries , in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, where she first made her mark in 2005 with Marock . The film revisits the same subject.
"My aim with this film is to humanise these women – or at least to show them as human beings – because they’re often pigeonholed, always put into the same boxes," Laïla told The New Arab in Cannes. Discovering 'invisibilised' women After depicting Morocco’s upper-class society in Marock and Rock the Casbah , as well as directing episodes of Damien Chazelle’s Netflix series The Eddy and several French television shows, including The Bureau , Laïla turned her attention to the stories of Moroccan women who travelled to Spain hoping to provide a better life for their families back home.
"I wanted to do a survival story," she said, reflecting on the bravery and resilience of the women who spoke out despite the risk of losing everything, including being shamed or abandoned by their husbands and families in Morocco.
At the time, women around the world were also speaking publicly during the global #MeToo movement with global consequences.
Back in 2019, Laïla said she discovered a whole world of "invisibilised migrant women." Although their experiences were very different from her own – she was born and raised in Casablanca before moving to Paris as a young adult, where she is now based – she felt connected to their stories and believed they needed to be told through cinema.
"I thought their stories also echoed the experience of leaving home and the sense of vertigo that comes with it," Laïla told The New Arab . "I’ve had to deal with not being understood, with having to explain things that people don’t get. Even though I have the tools to do so, because I speak French, there’s still a huge cultural gap for me in France." Six years of research Despite being a Moroccan woman herself, Laïla said it took a long time before she felt legitimate enough to make a film about such a complex and difficult subject.
"I was interested in this, but I was still a bit wary of the subject because it’s not my reality," she said.
That is why Laïla took almost six years to make the film – years that included extensive research into a topic that intersects migration and gender issues in a geographical space with much at stake politically, between two countries, Spain and Morocco, and two continents, Europe and Africa.
But Laïla did not want to make a documentary or an academic thesis. She wanted to make a film for the big screen.
She decided that, while the story would be loosely based on real events, it would ultimately remain a work of fiction, with an original script co-written with Delphine Agut .
"We decided to really step back and create our own story and characters, and above all to portray the intimacy between these women," Laïla said. From hopeful recruitment to exploitation Shot between Morocco and Spain, the film centres on Hasna, played by Nisrin Erradi , who is known in Morocco for Adam and Everybody Loves Touda , both of which were screened at Cannes in 2019 and 2024, respectively.
Hasna, a former taekwondo fighter, moves to Spain after attending a job interview that required a passport, medical tests, a criminal record check and her husband’s consent.
Arriving at a farm near Huelva, she sleeps in a prefabricated container with Meriem, played by Hajar Graigaa , another newcomer, alongside two veteran workers: Zineb, played by Hind Braik , who arrived two years earlier, and Khadija, played by Fatima Attif , who has been there for five years.
But Hasna soon becomes disillusioned by the horrible working conditions and wages that are far below what she had been promised. She also witnesses other women becoming victims of rape and sexual assault by some of the farm’s Spanish male managers.
The men, however, do not expect the women to complain or speak out because of the structural power they hold over them. The cost of 'red gold' Spain is the largest exporter of strawberries in Europe, and the fruit is known as "red gold," particularly in Andalusia, which produces 80% of the country’s strawberries .
According to recent data from Spain’s Department of Agriculture, Huelva’s strawberry production is worth an estimated 408 million euros, or around 475 million dollars, providing a major boost to the Spanish economy.
Neither the Spanish nor the Moroccan governments responded decisively to help migrant women who became victims of sexual violence and labour exploitation on these farms. Instead, activists and lawyers helped bring wider attention to their cases and secure better protection for their rights.
In the film, Hasna and the other women eventually build a legal case with the support of a Spanish female lawyer who wants to defend them.
But they also experience moments of cultural misunderstanding with her, including differing views on gender violence and feminism.
"These [Moroccan] women are just trying to survive," Laïla said. "They’re not concerned with issues of feminism, though the issue of justice is very important in the film."
Beyond being a story about female solidarity and the resilience of migrant women, the film also explores the hopes and disappointments tied to the search for a new life, or what Laïla describes as an "El Dorado."
"It’s a kind of dream we all have, and I think every human being needs to be carried along by a dream in order to move forward, but we’re always caught up by this concept of reality," Laïla told The New Arab . "But human beings have a need to imagine. We all need to use our imagination to keep on living, and that’s why cinema is important, because it allows us to imagine different worlds." Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw Follow him on Instagram: @ alexander.duri e