Laila Marrakchi on returning to the Atlas Workshops with her highly anticipated ‘La Más Dulce’

“It’s a chance to come back to where it all started,” says Laila Marrakchi of her return to the Atlas Workshops industry incubator of the Marrakech International Film Festival. “I began the process with them. They showed me so much support. I love this place; it’s like my family in a way.” 

The Paris-based, Casablanca-born filmmaker, who won acclaim for her debut Marock, is referring to her latest film La Más Dulce, which is participating as a feature fiction project in post-production at Workshops. Marrakchi first presented the project as a work in progress in the co-production market of the Workshops in 2021. 

The highly anticipated film, Marrakchi’s third, marks her return to filmmaking after more than 10 years working on series for Netflix and French TV broadcasters.

Written by Marrakchi and Delphine Agut, La Más Dulce was inspired by a group of female Moroccan fruit pickers in south-east Spain who filed lawsuits alleging abuse by their employers.

The story centres on Hasna, played by renowned actress Nisrin Erradi, whose credits include Everybody Loves Touda and Adam, who leaves her home town in Morocco to work as a seasonal strawberry picker in Huelva. The title, literally “the sweetest one” in English, refers to the fruit Hasna and her companions harvest while they endure the bitter reality of their inhumane working conditions.

“They left Morocco for Spain for work and for their emancipation,” Marrakchi says. “The film is a scream [of protest].”

She hopes La Más Dulce will make audiences think about where the fruit they buy from the local supermarket comes from.

A forbidden world

Marrakchi says she chose to make a drama instead of a documentary on the subject matter “because it’s difficult to enter this kind of world,” she explains. “It’s completely forbidden and closed. For me, fiction is a way to speak to a larger audience.”

Together with Agut, they undertook a lot of research to understand the lives of seasonal workers.

Professional actresses Erradi, Hajar Graigaa (Deserts) and Fatima Attif (Across The Sea) play the lead roles, while Marrakchi cast real fruit pickers as supporting players. 

La Más Dulce is being produced by France’s Lumen in co-production with Spain’s Fasten Seat Belt, Belgium’s Mirage Films and Moroccan filmmaker Saïd Hamich Benlarbi’s Casablanca-based Mont Fleuri Production.

“At around €2 million, this is a low-budget film, in Arabic and Spanish,” says Marrakchi. “It had a small budget because it was not in French. It was a fight for Lumen’s Juliette Schrameck to find money to make this film. But I was really impressed with her and Saïd’s work.”

La Más Dulce shot between Morocco and several cities in Andalusia, Spain.

Valuable experience

Marrakchi broke onto the international circuit in 2005 with her debut feature Marock, which screened in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. Her follow-up was female-centric family drama Rock The Casbah, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013.

When that film failed to match the success of her debut, Marrakchi moved into television, directing several series which include two episodes of Damien Chazelle’s The Eddy for Netflix, as well as several French productions, including Eric Rochant’s French spy series The Bureau. The experience of working for the small screen has reaped rewards.

”I learn a lot [from] series,” she says. ” I feel more comfortable on sets and with technical things after this and [working with] French and American actors [has made me] feel more legitimate.”

She has also been working on the Casablanca-set drama series Casa Girls in collaboration with Stephanie Duvivier and Dorothee Lachaud.

• Suha Arraf talks about hiding politics in human stories for Atlas Workshops project ’Chentian’