Projects in development
La más dulce
Synopsis
Tangier. Fatema, a mother of a nine-year old boy, has just been released from prison. Now, she wants to get to Andalusia in time for strawberry season. For Fatema, Spain is an Eldorado, offering the dream of making enough money to restart her life with her son—a second chance she does not want to miss. But once there, she is quickly caught up in reality. Fortunately, she befriends Amina, Saida and Khadija, women from the countryside. Together, they face hard work in the greenhouses, deplorable living conditions, and constant harassment. In isolation, they survive in a place where they do not speak the language and do not know their rights. La más dulce tells the story of how these four women speak out, denouncing their experiences at the risk of losing everything.
Delphine Agut, Laïla Marrakchi
Cinestésia (Morocco)
Laïla Marrakchi
lailaja007@gmail.com
Director’s statement
La más dulce —"the sweetest" in Spanish—points to the origin of the strawberries that are bought in supermarkets in Europe. Spain exports 300,000 tons of strawberries every year, representing €600 million. Behind this industry is a clandestine world of men and women from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe. I wanted to make a political film that tells the story of four women who are forced to submit to the law of the strongest, keep silent and toil in the fields to earn money. They respond to the racial and patriarchal capitalism that renders them invisible because they do not speak the language, have no rights, are for the most part illiterate, are mothers and are sometimes divorced and therefore vulnerable. La más dulce proceeds in the manner of a survival or prison film, depicting these women trapped in plastic greenhouses and rebelling against the system.
Biographies
Laila Marrakchi is a director and screenwriter.
Marock, her first feature-length film, was presented in the Un Certain Regard section of the Festival de Cannes in 2005. It depicts the golden age of Casablanca, when first love brings together a young Muslim woman and a young Jewish man. Her second film, Rock the Casbah, featuring a prestigious cast including Hiam Abbass, Nadine Labaki, Lubna Azabal, Morjana Alaoui and Omar Sharif, was released in 2013. She directed five episodes of Le Bureau des Légendes in seasons 1, 2 and 4, signed two episodes of The Eddy and has just completed work on Opera, the new Orange series. Currently, Marrakchi is working on her next feature-length film, La más dulce, as well as creating the series Casa Girls, which examines the sentimental and sexual tribulations of four young women in contemporary Casablanca.
€2 000 000
Summer 2022, Morocco, Spain
Spring 2023
Co-producers, sales agent, distributors
