Taking viewers by surprise and thrusting them into an unsuspected world where they become parties to the characters’ tenacious search for freedom and identity, Areeb Zuaiter’s debut feature documentary Yalla Parkour is one of the most refreshingly original approaches to the current tragedy unfolding in Gaza. Alternating the breathtaking parkour training of Ahmad, a boy living in Gaza, and Zuaiter’s own memories of her Palestinian mother, the film takes the audience on a double journey from 2012 to the present, allowing the inside and outside viewpoints of the protagonists to enrich and even contradict each other.
Screened out of competition at the Amman Film Festival, where Zuaiter is the head of programing, this intriguing film has already won the Grand Jury Prize in International Competition at Doc NYC and the Golden Firebird Award for documentary at Hong Kong.
It is not about the Gaza conflict with Israel per se, but rather captures the terrible feeling of constraint that oppresses the young men there, who can only leave Gaza’s tightly controlled borders with luck and the utmost effort to wade through bureaucratic paperwork. That sense of entrapment provides the unstated motivation for Ahmad and his friends to self-train in the discipline of parkour on the sand dunes and among the rubble of the bombed-out buildings around them.
Said to originate with the French military’s parcours du combatant (path of the warrior), parkour is a high-discipline training program whose goal is to overcome obstacles in an environment with speed and agility. The attraction of the sport in Gaza is obvious. Over and over we see heart-stopping videos that the band of young athletes has shot on their phones, vaunting their daring dives and tumbles off cliffs and concrete girders protruding from the rubble. One of these buildings is identified as the former airport in Rafah, now completely unrecognizable after being destroyed by Israel beginning with the Second Intifada in 2000. Thus is the history of Gaza subtly interwoven into the film.
Giving the story a framework and putting the action scenes into context, editor and co-writer Phil Jandaly periodically cuts away to fixed-frame shots of a cozy upstairs room in a leafy, snow-bound landscape, where Zuaiter sits at her computer – the very image of the filmmaker in control of her material. From this civilized control room she talks to Ahmad in dusty Gaza, in conversations that are relaxed and personal. The fact that she prefers to remain off-screen gives even more power to her calm voice guiding their stories.
The careful camera set-ups in these scenes create a poetic evocation of displacement, albeit a comfortable one, that sets up the dual POVs. Though cleverly layered for maximum contrast, the nostalgia Zuaiter professes for her mother, who passed away in 2012, and for her childhood and Palestinian homeland remains more spoken than emotionally projected. Lacking vivid images, the director is repeatedly shown drawing an imagined Mediterranean sea, like a persistent memory she can’t get rid of. Underlined by delicate music scored by Diab Mekari, these interludes struggle to project the requisite emotion. It’s a relief when Ahmad validates her wish to be “one of us”, when he simply tells her she is, indeed, Palestinian.
Her plaintive longing to set foot in Gaza seems as impossible as Ahmad’s persistent dream of following in the footsteps of two older parkour pals and emigrating to Europe. Since we know what kind of war is coming, the boy’s journey has an urgency that overpowers the filmmaker’s pursuit of memory and her unease at having a U.S. passport and a Palestinian identity. And yet, in the closing scenes set in 2023, one of the two will achieve their goal against all odds.
Technically the film is an astute contrast between different styles of cinematography. The amateur Internet footage from Gaza turns that devastated landscape into a symbolic commentary on history. In the remarkable opening shots, Ahmad’s friends practice backflips with nonchalance while bombs explode spectacularly in the background. Another unforgettable scene shows a parkour athlete, Jinji, climbing up the indented face of a very tall building. He is almost at the top when he loses his footing, his fall followed by a trembling phone camera, breaking 50 bones but surviving. In a film full of implicit danger, it is the only case where real damage is done.
Director: Areeb Zuaiter
Screenwriters: Areeb Zuwaiter, Phil Jandaly with Nino Kirtadze, Johan Simonsson, Salwa Nakkara, Alex Szalat
Producer: Basel Mawlawi
With: Areeb Zuaiter, Ahmad Matar
Cinematography: Umit Gulsen, Ibrahim Al Olta, Marco Padoan
Editing: Phil Jandaly
Music: Diab Mekari
Sound design: Yehya Zakaria Breshe
Production company: Kinana Films (Sweden)
World sales: Arthood Entertainment
Venue: Amman International Film Festival (Out of Competition)
In Arabic, English, Swedish
89 minutes
