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
“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
