‘Strawberries’ Review: The Indignities Faced by Migrant Workers Unfold Through the Eyes of a Brilliant Young Actress

Director Laila Marrakchi pulls from real stories of Moroccan immigrants to construct a damning indictment of a labor system that leaves them voiceless.

If you were dropped into a greenhouse full of strawberries and instructed to pick everything in your row by a supervisor speaking tersely a foreign language, what would you do about the unripe ones? Skip them and you might appear to be incapable of finishing a task, but pick them and you end up wasting fruit and creating more work for the people sorting them. With your survival on the line, you have to decide quickly.

It’s one of the first challenges that Hasna (Nisrin Erradi) faces in “Strawberries” after migrating from Morocco to Spain with the hopes of a better life. And while it’s resolved fairly quickly after she guesses wrong, the scene becomes a skeleton key that explains much of Laila Marrakchi’s painful film about the lives of migrant workers. The Moroccan immigrants who staff this berry farm appear to live simple lives, spending their days on repetitive manual labor and their evenings in shabby housing with minimal material possessions. But when your entire existence relies on the whims of an employer with whom you can barely communicate, everything becomes complicated.

Paychecks are dispensed on a schedule that has far more to do with the whims of the men handing them out than any pattern you could identify on a calendar. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it — but you can’t expect the street peddlers who sell you blankets and prepaid cell phones at ridiculous markups to understand that. There’s an hourly rate, but the actual number of hours you’re compensated for is determined with all the precision of soccer timekeeping, with supervisors guessing how many breaks you probably took after the fact and subtracting that number from what you earned. Nobody is rounding down.

While it’s hardly the first film to explore the exploitation of immigrants, “Strawberries” stands out for its reliance on a single character’s perspective and the fact that its lead actress is more than capable of carrying that load. We see everything through the eyes of Hasna, a young girl whose immigration experience takes her on a journey from confusion, to fear, to righteous anger. She knew that she wasn’t signing up for a cushy life when she leaves Morocco and takes the job picking strawberries, but she immediately understands that this isn’t how a workplace is supposed to function at any level of the socioeconomic spectrum. Her initial outbursts are quickly shushed by the older women she lives and works with, all of whom appear to have seen their own individuality dulled after years of accepting a system that tells you gratefully accepting crumbs is the only way to avoid being left with nothing.

On some level, Hasna senses that such a soulless, Kafkaesque environment has to be hiding worse evils than paycheck withholding and infrequent bathroom breaks. She soon uncovers a dark underbelly of severe sexual assault and kidnapping that’s closer to modern slavery than anything that we would consider employment. Her sincere efforts at pushing back and organizing for a better workplace are met with the bleak reality that the surrounding society is ill-prepared to do anything to help people in her situation. The kindest interpretation of the legal and political system that the film depicts is that these people are so utterly invisible that nobody even remembers that they’re human beings. Alternative explanations only get more malicious from there.

Marrakchi’s camera keeps returning to images of strawberries in various states of dying on the vine, and the fruit lends itself to multiple interpretations. At first, the gorgeous ripe berries are evidence of how perfect our planet can be, corrupted only by the selfish impulses of a human race that’s largely uninterested in caring for anything on it when there isn’t a profit to be made. As the berries rot and attract flies, there’s a more direct correlation to the ways that migrant life wears down the souls of these workers.

But the best strawberry metaphor is still the first one, when Hasna can’t figure out whether to pick the unripe ones or leave them behind. A society that takes a one-size-fits-all approach might adequately be able to meet the needs of the people who were already best prepared for it, but it only makes things worse for those who were already falling through the cracks.

Grade: B

“Strawberries” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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