A generation ago, Moroccan director Laila Marrakchi arrived at the Cannes Film Festival with her 2005 debut Marock, a sensitive portrait of teenage life in Casablanca.
“When I came with Marock, there was no Arab film,” she tells The National. “As a woman filmmaker, I was one of the first.”
The film was a big hit in Morocco and the Arab-speaking world, putting Marrakchi in the vanguard. “After that, there were many, many, many Arab film directors, like Kaouther Ben Hania … many.”
Sitting on the UniFrance terrace, the Casablanca-born Marrakchi, 50, is back in Cannes with her third feature La Mas Dulce (Strawberries), which this week premiered in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, as Marock did 21 years ago.
It feels “completely different”, she says. “Now it’s Un Certain Regard on the world,” she smiles, noting how there are films in the same section from as far afield as Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nepal.
To say she is thrilled to be back is an understatement. “It’s more cosmopolitan in a certain way, and so I feel more comfortable,” she says. “I think this is the good place for the film. I’m so happy.”
Arriving 13 years after her second feature Rock the Casbah, which featured an appearance from Omar Sharif, La Mas Dulce takes her out of her comfort zone. The story is set in Andalusia in southern Spain, among Moroccan workers who come to the country for seasonal work, picking strawberries in harsh conditions for meagre sums.
The story was inspired by real events. A close friend of Marrakchi’s, a journalist for The New York Times, was investigating a case in Spain as workers filed a complaint against a finca – or agricultural estate – for exploitation and abuse.
“I think it was maybe one of the first times when a woman decided to speak, to tell what happened in the strawberry fields,” Marrakchi says. “I was curious how this woman decided to speak out. Because they are not used to speaking out, to denounce the conditions, the harassment.”
Co-writing with Delphine Agut, Marrakchi spent four years researching the story, although to simplify matters, she deliberately veered away from the true events.
La Mas Dulce follows two Moroccan women, Hasna (Nisrin Erradi) and Meriem (Hajar Graigaa), as they arrive in search of a better life. Instead, they find hostile working conditions and, worse, abuse and harassment at the hands of their male paymasters. But rather than suffer in silence, Hasna decides to speak out.
“It’s kind of #MeToo in the strawberry fields,” Marrakchi says.
When she met real workers who travel to Spain for seasonal work, she was stunned. “It was Morocco in Spain,” she says. “They recreate Morocco in Spain.”
And, of course, she understands exactly why they come. “It’s kind of an El Dorado in Spain for them. They decide to leave to make more money than what they can get in Morocco, and they imagine they can have a better life.”
Some, she concedes, return year after year and have good experiences. But within this capitalist system, there are those who slip through the cracks. Hasna’s fight, as she teams up with a sympathetic Spanish lawyer, is an energising one.
“I didn’t want to show this woman as only a victim, OK?” Marrakchi says. “It is important for me to put faces to who these people are … to show them with dignity.”
Shot across only 25 days, Marrakchi had to remain nimble, rewriting scenes, including a powerful final speech from Hasna as she implores the Spanish authorities to treat her and her co-workers with humanity.
“I said, ‘OK, the most important thing… [is] what we had inside us. We need really to speak out, to scream to the world that we are not invisible, we are visible, we are women, Arab, Muslim, and we are just human.’ And for me it was super important.”
Marrakchi says such issues are hardly confined to the strawberry fields of Andalusia, with similar stories of exploitation emerging from California to China. Is she expecting a reaction in Spain to the film?
“I don’t know,” she sighs. “It’s a way to speak about … the condition of the workers. Maybe it’s a way for these people to have better consideration, better conditions … but I don’t know, I don’t know what the impact will be.”
After only just completing the film, Marrakchi has no immediate plans for a fourth feature, but that does not mean she has stopped working.
“I’m doing a documentary about my mother. She’s a bridge champion in Morocco.”
Last year, she followed her to a championship in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for the first pan-Arab tournament for women. “I need to edit this,” she says, all too aware of the long road ahead.
For the moment, like those lush strawberries, it is time for her to bask in the Mediterranean sun.
