The Jacket is a portrait of Jamal Hindawi, a Palestinian man who lives in exile with his family in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Together with his friends, he makes political theatre about their profound connection to their homeland, Palestine, and their situation as refugees in their country of residence, Lebanon. When Jamal embarks on a journey to search for an important lost theatre prop, he witnesses how the successive political and economic crises have disrupted an entire region and its people.
“Shatila was a site of a horrific massacre during the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1980s. “I think when you are making a film like this, I think it is very important to be aware of the past and certain triggers…in a certain way, it could be very easy to talk about the massacres in a film, but Shatila is always approached from this angle – [and] is much more than this event,” the director Poppe reflects. “There were many films that were made about this massacre before. For this film and the one we made before, there is a certain wish from side to look at the future and not open the wounds always from the past.””
Geoffrey Macnab / Business Doc Europe
“Within this figurative and literal wasteland; Jamal’s quest takes place. Jamal’s tale of displacement is not an isolated story; ideally, his story opens up the understanding of the stories of the people he meets on his journey. Together they form a landscape that shows the uprootedness of a region, a belonging that is being disrupted.”
Mathijs Poppe
“Poppe alights on what Jamal’s spiritual and actual homeland of Palestine precisely means to him, why it occupies such a peculiar space of yearning as he enters the latter phase of his life, and how the recreational and familial activities he enjoys furnish and nurture this.”
David Katz / Cineuropa
“Because we used fiction, and because we were setting up scenes in a certain way, [Jamal and I] had to kind of work together on this, and we had to share the production process. That forced a collaboration because I approached them not as characters, but rather as actors, and it helped making this film together. It started with my graduation film, but then it continued specifically with Jamal with The Jacket. It was very organic how he understood that I wanted to work on this jointly. There is a certain parallel between the character he's playing on the theatre stage and the one he is playing in the film. This mingling between a fictional character and himself had already taken place in his own artistic endeavour.”
Mathijs Poppe / Cineuropa
