the endless caravan

Ariane Mertens, Morocco, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, The, 2004

Producers synopsis
Every summer, more than one million Moroccan economic migrants who live and work in western Europe set off by car to visit their homeland. A straight 36-hour drive brings their battered and overloaded vehicles to long queues at Spain's southern ports. After an average ten-hour wait at the border, they are let onto a ferry for the short trip to Tangier and further into Morocco. THE ENDLESS CARAVAN is a documentary road-movie which follows two young second-generation Moroccans from the West as they undertake this intensive trip with their families. Underneath the surface of our traveling protagonists lingers a deep-rooted identity crisis which confronts them every day of their lives. Both born and raised in Belgium, they face this struggle in different ways. For Ouasima (22) of Antwerp and Billal (19) of Brussels, the annual trip is a metaphor for their double-life with one foot in the West, and another in Morocco. Never before have we been able to be so close to the everyday challenges within Moroccan family life.