The Jacket

Runtime: 80', 50'

Expected release: May, 2023

Production stage: Preproduction

Budget: €325,750 (63% in place)

1st feature: Yes

Looking for: Festivals, sales agents / distributors, buyers, gap financing

Synopsis:

Jamal Hindawi (50), Palestinian, lives with his family in Shatila camp in Beirut, where he makes political theatre. He is currently working on a play that tells the story of an old jacket that symbolises the Palestinian identity. But the evening before the premiere, Jamal loses the theatre prop. He starts a nightly journey through the streets of Beirut and is confronted with a city in radical transition.

Director’s profile:

Mathijs Poppe, born in 1990 in Ghent (Belgium), graduated in 2017 with great distinction from School of Arts Ghent (KASK) with Ours is a Country of Words. For this medium length documentary, he worked together with a couple of families in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, to tell a story that balances on the thin line between fiction and documentary. The film was selected for Visions du Réel, screened at numerous international film festivals around the world and got awarded with a Wildcard by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF). Since then, Mathijs has developed several film and video projects as a director, cameraman and editor. At the moment Mathijs is working on his first feature film, The Jacket, in which he will continue and deepen his collaboration with the Palestinian community in Lebanon.

Producers’s profile:

Before establishing her own production company Mirage, Elisa Heene worked within different Belgian companies and contributed to projects such as Home by Fien Troch and The Miracle of Almería by Moon Blaisse. Meanwhile, she also independently produced documentary Ours is a Country of Words by Mathijs Poppe. In 2017 she joined Serendipity Films and started developing and producing documentaries and fiction films, such as Dark Rider by Eva Küpper and Howling by Laura Van Haecke. In 2020 she founded Mirage to work independently with authors and filmmakers who are critical of the world they live in and who explore new artistic terrains. Elisa is currently producing several projects including features Holly by Fien Troch and Skiff by Cecilia Verheyden and documentary The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe. She is also an alumna of the MAIA and Eurodoc Workshops and the Rotterdam Lab.