In the last couple of years I’ve seen various documentaries made by director Marijn Poels. He seems to be unstoppable and travels the world to point his camera on various important subjects. Often these are about big issues, which are told from a personal perspective. For his newest documentary he didn’t travel far as he looks at two men who travelled to the Netherlands from Marocco to work there.
The 83-year-old Lakhdar Maazouzi travels back to Marocco and does so with his daughter for the first time. He shows her where he was born, the mines in which he worked and the place he would like to be buried. The other man is Larbi Yahyia (68), who also came for low paying work in order to support his family, but who decided to start a fast food restaurant and had success. His wife tells her daughters which issues they ran into, when society expected them to go back to Marocco and the government didn’t help them learning the language or finding their way.
Poels shot the movie partly in Morocco and manages to capture the atmosphere, with beautiful shot of a decaying mine or a cattle market. With that Two Lives in One Heart is an interesting portrait of two families whose lives were impacted when the decision was made to head to the Netherlands. Although Maazouzi loves to visit Marocco, but also sees how his children have found their roots in the Netherlands resulting his heart also having to be divided between those two countries.
