Ten years ago, the young Belgian filmmaker Matthijs Poppe, then still a film student, visited the Palestinian refugee camp Shatila in the south of Beirut for the first time. There he met Jamal Hindawi and his family, with whom he made his graduation project Ours Is a Country of Words (2017). Now Jamal is the central figure in The Jacket, Poppe’s first feature-length film.
Jamal, whose parents fled to Lebanon during the Nakba, is working with a number of friends on a political theater play. It’s a piece about their connection with Palestine and their position as refugees in the country in which they were born. This is symbolized by a prop made by Jamal, a jacket covered in colorful patches of different shapes and sizes.
With the loss of this jacket begins a quest that gives the film a beautiful cinematic structure, reminiscent of the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Jamal’s conversations with the people he meets during his search, as gentle as they are instructive, compellingly reveal the rifts in Beirut’s socioeconomic life, and the pain caused by historical dislocation.
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