Mathijs Poppe • Director of The Jacket (2024)

27/11/2024 - The Belgian director speaks about using a blend of documentary and fiction to create a story that reckons with the past, present and Palestinian hopes for the future

Mathijs Poppe brought his debut feature, The Jacket[+see also:
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interview: Mathijs Poppe
filmprofile], to IDFA for its international premiere after a world premiere at Film Fest Gent. After visiting Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Beirut, at 19, he developed close relationships with many of the families there. This led to his first filmic works and, eventually, the development of the critical and collaborative approach he utilised to create The Jacket, featuring Jamal, a Palestinian man living in the camp.

Cineuropa: I’ve read about your perspective on changing the filmmaker-subject relationship, and avoiding these kinds of clichés and more exploitative stories. So, what does your approach look like?
Mathijs Poppe: Because we used fiction, and because we were setting up scenes in a certain way, [Jamal and I] had to kind of work together on this, and we had to share the production process. That forced a collaboration because I approached them not as characters, but rather as actors, and it helped making this film together. It started with my graduation film, but then it continued specifically with Jamal with The Jacket. He worked in theatre, and he was the one that picked up the most on this collaborative way of working, where he was seen as an actor, because he also saw himself as an actor in the first place. It was very organic how he understood that I wanted to work on this jointly. There is a certain parallel between the character he's playing on the theatre stage and the one he is playing in the film. This mingling between a fictional character and himself had already taken place in his own artistic endeavour.

I still see the value of the film more as a documentary, in the sense that, yes, we are using fictional tools, but the movie still talks about Jamal's world, the one he's inhabiting, and his political situation. It all comes from this situation that he's living in; everything is drawn from there. That’s the bigger arc. If you're asking about practical, day-to-day things, then I would say that every scene is very different because some scenes were more “written” than others. I never wrote any dialogue or anything like that, but some scenes were more functional within the larger story and were more fictionalised in that sense. I was setting up certain situations, and then it was up to whoever was there to kind of figure out their position and how they wanted to interact with each other as characters.

Can you elaborate on this idea of blurring reality and fiction? What is your own relationship to both, and can you dig deeper into the film’s relationship with them?
When I was working on my graduation film, which was about a fictional return to Palestine for the Palestinian refugees, I noticed [this] in Shatila especially, although it’s there in all of the refugee camps in Lebanon: there is a lot of talk about this return to Palestine. It's a fiction that they are kind of living with, which hopefully will become true at some point. Also because of that, I started to see that we are all constantly living with fictions in our head. We are constantly projecting things and futures, but also pasts, and we are trying to make sense of the world around us through fiction. The beautiful thing about Jamal working on his stage play was that there was a parallel between these things. He used fiction as a way of dealing with his situation as a Palestinian in Lebanon.

Can you share a bit about the grounded visual style of the film? Did you have a particular vision to start with, or did it emerge organically?
When we shot the first part of the film, the theatre play and the bit with Jamal at home with his family, that's when we started to develop the visual style or language of the movie. It took quite a lot of time. We were there for three weeks. There was a lot of trial and error. […] When we went back, which was about one year later, to film the second part, by then, the visual style had kind of condensed a lot. We wanted to see the film as an opening up to the world, in a certain sense, from Jamal's perspective. That’s why we started in these closed spaces in his house and in the theatre hall. Gradually, we wanted to open up more and more to a kind of broader world. […] In the end, there’s a moment where we see the city. When he's talking to his daughter, that's the moment we open up the most. In the mountains, we have this view out over the valley, but later in the movie, when we are panning over the city, there's a collision between this visual broadness and the very intimate conversation between him and his daughter. That was the melding together of these two worlds that we wanted to bring in.