Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe, whose new documentary The Jacket screened at the Flemish CONNEXT showcase, has been at the Gent Festival this week, just down the road from Antwerp, but he hasn’t been showing a movie. “I work here as an editor. It’s really just taking formats, making DCPs for the cinemas thinks like that, just technical work,” Poppe tells BDE of his current “side hustle” between making his own movies.
It’s very likely, though, that The Jacket, produced through Elisa Heene’s company Mirage, will soon be unveiled at an international festival. The film is now completed. It follows Jamal Hindawi, a Palestinian living in Beirut, in the Shatila refugee camp. He is working on a play in which an old jacket stands as a symbol for Palestinian identity. That jacket goes missing. This leads to Jamal embarking on an eventful journey from the mountains through Beirut.
Poppe first visited Lebanon around 13 years ago when he went there as a volunteer in a youth centre that a friend was setting up in Shatila. “Since then, in the years after, I went back and forth,” the Belgian director says of a country with which he now has a very close relationship. “What most drew me to go back to Lebanon was just the people. I met amazing people in Shatila. That was the reason why I think I kept on going back.”
In this period, Poppe was studying filmmaking back home in Belgium. He may have been visiting Lebanon regularly but, at first, he wasn’t thinking about making a film there.
The country has faced well chronicled problems in recent times – the devastating explosion in the port, the collapse of the local currency and an ongoing cost of living crisis. This hasn’t lessened Poppe’s affection for Beirut. He has now known Jamal for many years.
“Jamal doesn’t speak English. Of course, that doesn’t make it easier but his children spoke English very well. I got along well with them, we started hanging around in his living room, and this relationship grew,” the director says of how he bonded with his subject. “You spend time with someone and you get to know them even if you don’t speak the same language and there is a common understanding that grows out of that.”
Jamal was a popular and well-known figure in the community – someone often sought out by international visitors.
The Belgian director and the Palestinian have already made one short film together, Ours Is A Country Of Words (2017), also set in Shatila and exploring the nostalgia and yearning that Palestinian exiles in Lebanon feel for their lost homeland. “We worked on that film together with his family. Every time I visited we spent time together and we started talking, he talked a lot about this theatre play that they worked on and which he played the main character in. He was very proud about it,” Poppe recalls.
The more Jamal talked about the play, the more curious the director became. “At a certain point, I asked if he was interested in repeating this way of working where we combine documentary and fiction together.”
Poppe has known his producer Elisa Heene since they were both 11 years old and at school together. “We were in the same school for eight years so we got to know each other very well. She knew that I was working in film. When I started working on Ours Is A Country Of Words, I asked her to produce it…”
This was when Poppe was still at film school and before Heene’s company Mirage had been founded. The producer visited Lebanon several times and has a strong understanding of the life and culture there.
Shatila was 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 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.”
What do the people in Shatila make of the young Belgian filmmaker in their midst, telling stories about their lives? “There are many different reactions I would say. People have their judgements…I think in the end, the most important question lies with the people we worked with and that worked on the film,” Poppe says. As long as “they feel we contributed in a certain way,” he insists he will be happy.
Poppe is yet to show the film in Beirut – but Jamal and his family have seen it already. “I went in May when the final stretch of editing was coming up to show it to Jamal and his family and to hear what they had to say about it.”
The Jacket was made with co-production partners in Belgium (Dérives), France (Fulgurance), The Netherlands (Family Affair Films) and Lebanon (Placeless Films).
Having completed The Jacket, Poppe is now looking toward future projects – but he hasn’t discounted working again in Lebanon with Jamal. “We have to let things settle a little bit after finishing this film and then see if there is still that inspiration on both sides…but it might very well be!”
