A Conversation with Mathijs Poppe (THE JACKET)

Filmmaker Mathijs Poppe first stepped foot in the Shatia refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon 13 years ago as a volunteer at a youth center in the camp. Upon the first interactions he had with those in the camp, he was overwhelmed with the welcomeness of the community present, as well as the tragedy leading them into it. His work from thereon out has focused on stories of displacement, working with Palestinians and Syrians in Beirut.

In an effort to escape the “trap of approaching these people as victims,” as he explains, Poppe put the stories and desires of his new friends and acquaintances into fiction, with the hope of seeing it as nonfiction. His latest film, The Jacket, puts a costume of documentary-style filming to construct a poignantly rich story of finding one’s identity despite unknown powers attempting to keep it beyond reach. The Jacket places the displaced identity in the metaphor of a jacket (surprise, surprise), the essential prop of a play, that gets lost around Beirut – an acute motif for the people creating the play itself.

Poppe’s work is a constant questioning of his perspective as a Western filmmaker, giving space for those at the end of his camera to speak for themselves, sharing their own stories and desires for liberation rather than using a disconnected lens of Western pity. In a conversation with him, edited for length and clarity, we spoke about how he tows this delicate line.

Hammer to Nail: How did this film come out of your past work in the Shatila Camp?

Mathijs Poppe: While we were working still on Ours is a Country of Words, Jamal was talking about this specific theater play where he played the main character Majbour and there was something I found really interesting in how he described himself in relation to the character he was playing on stage. In the theater play, you can see how they are using fiction to process their own situation as Palestinians in Lebanon and so I was initially interested in this notion of fiction as a way of processing their own situation.  We already knew that the jacket would get lost because there was a parallel between the story of the theater play in which his character tries to get rid of the jacket but it always magically comes back to him and I wanted to reverse this story. Jamal would always joke that if it were up to him, he would never have lost the jacket.

HtN: Can you please describe the writing and directing process for the film? Was there a script or more of an outline?

MP: The first stage of the of working on the script and the treatment of the film, it was very general – just an outline of scenes and ideas that we are at the theater Hall and they are discussing what the jacket means to them, for example. Very broad. As we went along and we did some casting for the characters that Jamal meets in the second part of the film, this became more more and more concrete. I talked with the characters, they told me certain stories from their life, and then I kind of included them in the script. We never, I never wrote any dialogs, but more in general, like general topics that Jamal and them could talk about. And so that’s, that’s like, the more we researched and worked on the with the characters of the film, it became more and more concrete.It was all about creating frameworks for them to be able to met, and these frameworks are set up in a fictional way, but allowed the characters to speak freely about their situations.

Zreik, Jamal’s friend who he goes to the mountains with was talking a lot during rehearsals about going to the mountains and picking thyme, so I decided to put this into the story. We created a scene where they are going to the mountains together. And when the two of them are having this long conversation, I didn’t tell them what to talk about. I told them, “You’re having a break now and you talk with each other.” It naturally came up, this talk about what they would do if they go back to Palestine.

HtN: Similarly, what was the casting process like? 

MP: These characters were mostly based on people that I met in the past. That was the the direction I gave towards the production manager Annabel Kemel, who wandered through Beirut to of look for these people. For example, with the Syrian workers, I had a very close friend who who fled Syria During the civil war there, and was living in Beirut for a long time.

A still from THE JACKET

HtN: The Jacket is strikingly reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, especially Close Up, given the documentary-style filmmaking of a staged yet somewhat true story. Was this intentional? 

MP: There’s been a lot of influence, especially films like where, where’s my friend’s house. The journey that Jamal goes through and finding his jacket and kind of meeting all these different characters is definitely inspired by Kiarostami’s work. But at the same time, it’s also difficult to compare yourself with this master of cinema,

HtN: What were some of the other influences at play in this film?

MP: Nicolás Pereda, He’s a he’s a Mexican, Canadian filmmaker. This may be a coincidence a little bit, but he works with a theater company in Mexico and created quite a few films together with them. In his work, there’s always this sense of finding the border between improvisations and scripted scenes and mingling these different forms together. And so this filmmaker also was a big inspiration for this film

HtN: Looking at the incredible tranquility with with you film the landscapes of Beirut – whether that be the hills looking like watercolor paintings, or the pan throughout the city, capturing apartment windows like constellations –it’s both breathtaking and tragic, knowing the destruction that has happened for decades in this area.  What purpose do you see your film holding as somewhat of time capsule of a moment in these decades of ongoing conflict?

MP: Especially for Palestinians in Lebanon, this war has been going on for, you know, 76 years now. But there is a new wave of destruction and a genocide that is going on in this region. While we are we were filming, the explosion happened in Beirut. This huge explosion, which happened maybe five years ago also changed the city a lot. There’s always a question of how to incorporate these tragic events while, at the same time, making the film to me timeless in a certain sense. Of course it never is. Definitely the film is some, some kind of document of its sign of its time.

HtN: Did the metaphor of the titular jacket as a symbol of Palestine change or evolve at all throughout filming?

MP: We came to show the film for the first time in Belgium in October and the four of us – me, Jamal, Hanan (Jamal’s daughter living in the U.K), and Mona, Jamal’s other daughter – had a conversation where Hanan said it’s not always easy to be Palestinian. She feels like she always has to carry this burden of being Palestinian and sometimes she wants to leave it behind. She is different people all at the same time, and doesn’t want to be reduced to one version. That is what they wanted to say in the theater play withMajbour trying to get rid of his jacket, but it always comes back to him. He also wants to get rid of it sometimes, but in the end he realized he has to carry this burden for the rest of his life. In the end, Jamal made peace with that and his Palestinian identity became the most important thing in his life. This freedom to let go with it and find it again is the freedom I have as a non-displaced person.

– Kaitlyn Hardy

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