We're happy to board THE JACKET by Mathijs Poppe, a poetic documentary about love that always prevails. The documentary will celebrate its international premiere at the IDFA in the Luminous section! Read more on Variety exclusive.

THE JACKET
by Mathijs Poppe
Belgium/France/The Netherlands/Lebanon, 2024, 71 min.

Synopsis
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 theater 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 theater prop, he witnesses how the successive political and economic crises have disrupted an entire region and its people.

Director's Note
After shooting OURS IS A COUNTRY OF WORDS, the first medium-length film I made with the families I have gotten to know in Shatila over the past 10 years, I decided to go back and work on this new project called THE JACKET. Shatila is a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, a place where more than twenty thousand refugees live on one square kilometre in very difficult conditions.

THE JACKET tells the story of Jamal Hindawi, one of the people that also worked with me on OURS IS A COUNTRY OF WORDS. Since the end of the Lebanese civil war, Jamal makes political theatre with his Palestinian friends from all over Lebanon. I follow him while he is working on a this play about a jacket with a very symbolic quality. As Jamal loses himself in the fictional story of the play, he also gets lost in the city of Beirut and is confronted with the country he has been living in his whole life, but never felt like home. 

The past years have been a true rollercoaster for the inhabitants of Beirut, after a political revolution that started in October 2019, a heavy financial crisis, and the port explosions on the 4th of August 2020. Many people have lost their jobs, houses and family members in a very short amount of time.

This urgent political situation slowly starts to break through in the film when Jamal continues his search for the jacket. As the symbolic jacket has gotten lost, Jamal himself gets lost in the city. He meets people from very different socio-economic, religious and political backgrounds. The quest for his jacket becomes an excuse to talk to strangers. In these meetings and conversations, the urgency of Lebanon’s political and economic situation becomes clear, and the jacket seems to lose its symbolical meaning in the midst of everything that is going on.