The Jacket + Q&A director Mathijs Poppe
On Wednesday 14 May, we’ll be screening The Jacket, the debut film by director Mathijs Poppe. After the screening, there will be a Q&A in which he will be present to answer questions about his film.
The Jacket
On the border between fiction and documentary, The Jacket shows an exiled Palestinian theatre maker’s search for a lost theatre prop on the streets of Beirut.
Jamal Hindawi lives with his family in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Together with his friends, he makes political theatre about their deep connection to their homeland, Palestine, and their situation as refugees in Lebanon. We follow Hindawi as he prepares a theatre piece in which the lead role is reserved for a coat. It is no ordinary piece of clothing; the coat is a symbol of the oppression of the Palestinian people. While travelling through Lebanon, Hindawi sees how successive political and economic crises have disrupted an entire region and its people.
On the thin line between fiction and documentary, the gentle film The Jacket shows how Jamal deals with homesickness for the country his parents fled even before he was born. Mathijs Poppe, who already worked with Jamal and his family for his graduation film Ours Is A Country Of Words, documents on whose shoulders fate weighs most heavily.