‘La Mas Dulce’ Review: Laïla Marrakchi Gives Visibility to Morocco’s Invisible Workers [B] Cannes
There are films that arrive carrying the weight of a social issue, and there are films that discover cinema within that issue. Laïla Marrakchi’s La Mas Dulce, premiering in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, flows frustratingly between the two. For much of its runtime, Marrakchi’s film feels like the beginning of a much-needed cinematic excavation: the lives of Moroccan women who travel seasonally to Spain for agricultural labor, leaving behind children, debts, and entire emotional lives in exchange for salaries that keep households afloat back home. Despite how structurally embedded this migration is within Moroccan society, cinema has barely touched it. One immediately thinks of Mohamed Asli’s Rough Hands, in which a teacher hoping to join her fiancé abroad tries to roughen her soft hands to convince recruiters she is fit for manual labor. Marrakchi opens her own film on hands too: weathered, nervous, busy hands preparing to cross borders for work.
The strongest decision Marrakchi makes is refusing to turn her film into misery porn. These women are not introduced as victims but as workers already experienced in navigating systems that exploit them. The film enters their world with patience: cramped dormitories, busy buses, and whispered gossip. One senses Marrakchi trying to recalibrate her cinema entirely. Known for dissecting the insulated neuroses of upper-class Moroccan milieus, she suddenly finds herself in a world defined by labor, precarity, and female solidarity. Surprisingly, she adapts well. There is no patronizing distance in the way she frames these women, only curiosity and attentiveness.
At the center is Nisrine Erradi, rapidly becoming one of the most dependable presences in Moroccan cinema after turns in Adam, Everybody Loves Touda, and La Mer au loin. Erradi has the rare ability to make opacity compelling. Her Hasna barely explains herself; she watches, absorbs, calculates. Nicknamed “the new Kill Bill,” she carries hints of an athletic past and arrives in Spain with little more than determination and a photograph of her son. Erradi smartly avoids sentimentalizing her. Hasna is neither a heroic worker nor a passive martyr. She is practical to the point of discomfort.
That discomfort becomes the film’s most interesting terrain. Among the women Hasna grows close to is Zineb, a younger worker played with affecting nuance by Hind Gregaa, whose quiet vulnerability slowly reveals itself beneath her warmth and optimism. When a supervisor enters the women’s showers and asks Hasna to leave him alone with Zineb, she obeys with barely any visible pushback. The moment lands like a slap because Marrakchi refuses to underline it. Hasna’s silence could have been framed as cowardice, betrayal, or moral failure, but it simply belongs to the survival logic governing the entire space. Later, when the same man installs Zineb in his home as both domestic servant and implied sexual object, the fracture between the two women becomes impossible to repair cleanly. What makes these scenes resonate is that nobody behaves according to the reassuring moral architecture that social dramas often depend on. The screenplay, co-written with Delphine Agut, understands that exploitation breeds compromised behavior long before it breeds resistance.
For a while, La Mas Dulce operates in that ambiguity beautifully. Then the film begins to distrust its own strengths. As the narrative shifts into procedural territory, the subtle observational texture gradually gives way to scenes that explain, insist, and overstate. Marrakchi starts pushing emotionally where she was previously simply looking. The tragedy is not that the film becomes “political” — it was always political — but that it starts illustrating its politics instead of discovering them through cinema. One can almost feel the screenplay tightening around the points it wants the audience to leave with.
The frustration comes precisely because so much of the film works. Marrakchi clearly cares about these women beyond their symbolic value, and the ensemble cast carries a realism that keeps the film grounded even when the writing grows schematic. Editor Nicolas Chaudeurge, a frequent collaborator of Andrea Arnold, gives the film a fluidity that often compensates for its more didactic stretches. Yet one leaves La Mas Dulce thinking less about what it says than about the film it almost became. Buried inside is a sharper, riskier work that is willing to sit fully inside contradiction, silence, and complicity without eventually spelling itself out. Even so, in a cinematic landscape where these women have remained largely invisible, La Mas Dulce still feels necessary. One just wishes necessity had been matched by a more adventurous cinematic instinct.
Grade: B
This review is from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival where La Mas Dulce had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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