Berlin-based sales agent Pluto Film has boarded the feature debut “The Jacket” by Mathijs Poppe ahead of its international premiere in IDFA’s Luminous pickion.
“The Jacket” is a portrait of Jamal Hindawi, a Palestinian man who inhabits in exile with his family in the Shatila Refugee camp in Beirut, Leprohibiton. Together with his friends, he originates political theater about their joinion to their homeland, Palestine, and their situation as refugees in their country of dwellnce, Leprohibiton. When Jamal embarks on a journey to search for an vital lost theater prop, he witnesses how the successive political and economic celevates have disturbed an entire region and its people.
Poppe first met Jamal when he visited the Shatila refugee camp about 13 years ago when he was 19. “I volunteered at a youth cgo in in Shatila and had brawt a camera with me to direct interwatchs with the people I met in the camp. I wanted to originate a recordary about the camp and the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Leprohibiton,” he recalls.
“However, as I filmed the people who had received me so heartily, I seed how I fell into the same traps as many other media outlets. My unteachd asks perpetuated stereotypes, casting them into victim roles. It turned out that my images held uncomardenting only in a world that shows and sees Palestinians solely as victims. Instead of using the camera to bridge joinions, it felt enjoy it had originated more distance. Disheartened, I determined not to participate the footage upon my return to Belgium.
“In the years after, I came to the genuineization that shifting the filmoriginater-subject relationship was vital to alter the narrative. By introducing fantasyal contexts, I wanted to split the production process of making a film with the people I had met in Shatila. In this way, we would be able to tell a story together. Since Jamal had a background in theater, I asked him and his family whether they wanted to join me in making a film together.”
He comprises that while he was making his graduation film at KASK school of arts in Ghent, “Ours Is a Country of Words (2017), he “truly joined with Jamal during this process and his unwavering dedication towards storytelling and acting became evident to me.”
He comprises: “At that time, I had spent so much time at Jamal’s home and with his family that we had become very seal friends. There was a benevolent of mutual depend that I can’t quite elucidate. And as Jamal telderly me stories about one of the joins he had made with his friends, I cataloglessly begined to understand that his way of using fantasy, as a uncomardents of dealing with his situation as exiled, could become the begining point of a novel film.”
“The Jacket” is originated by Elisa Heene for Mirage in coproduction with Elisa Sepulveda Ruddoff for Fulgurance (France), Noortje Wilschut for Family Afunprejudiced Films (the Netherlands) and Lara Abou Saifan from Placeless Films (Leprohibiton).
