‘Yalla Parkour’: Red Sea Review

Dir: Areeb Zuaiter. Sweden/Qatar/Saudi Arabia/Palestine. 2024. 89mins 

A Palestinian director living in America but seeking a connection with her homeland finds one unexpectedly in Yalla Parkour, a personal documentary about her growing bond with a Gazan parkour athlete. Areeb Zuaiter narrates the film as a direct address to her deceased mother, detailing her emotional isolation while expounding on a nearly 10-year friendship with Ahmed Matar, a young man who records balletic stunts around the wartorn region. The filmmaker finds beauty and freedomIn in Matar’s sometimes nerve-wracking feats — not to mention a refusal to succumb to the horrors of the Israeli occupation.

An exceedingly gentle film with an almost diaristic quality

The resulting film, which has its MENA premiere at Red Sea after winning Doc NYC’s Best International Documentary award, offers a more muted, but still affecting, way of processing the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The emphasis is on Zuaiter’s exchanges with Matar, as well as his arresting parkour footage, and the bittersweet, introspective tone should make this an appealing festival offering.

Zuaiter discovered Matar in 2015 while being captivated by online videos of parkour athletes — also known as traceurs — performing in Gaza. Although Zuaiter has lived in the US for years, Matar’s YouTube clips stir in her a yearning for her Palestinian roots. (Her family lived in the West Bank city of Nablus, roughly 100 km from Gaza.) Missing home and also her late mother, Zuaiter strikes up a long-distance friendship with this athlete, who wants to escape a Palestine where he feels he has no future.

Despite the potentially incendiary political subject matter, this is an exceedingly gentle film with an almost diaristic quality. Zuaiter’s narration is an intimate, ongoing conversation with her late mother as she shares her takeaways from getting to know Matar. (The documentary, Zuaiter’s first at feature length, is thematically connected to her 2019 non-fiction short Colors Of Resistance, which celebrated Palestinian artists such as painters and poets while examining her complicated relationship with her origins.) 

Zuaiter displays affection for this young traceur, whose life is central to the documentary’s meditation on existential dislocation. Over the course of nearly a decade, Matar becomes an adult: his desire for a fresh start moves from being an idle dream to taking tangible action. Some of his friends have already left Palestine by becoming professional parkour athletes or coaches, and he aspires to do the same. His ambition is lightly ironic to Zuaiter, who also longed to flee her homeland, only to eventually mourn its absence. 

Yalla Parkour features several of Matar’s parkour stunts, which involve dangerous backflips off dunes, hurtling from one structure to another and defying gravity by dangling off the edge of a tall building. (Zuaiter and Matar initially find common ground over their shared passion for filmmaking, with Matar responsible for much of the documentary’s parkour footage.) There is a poignancy to these athletic feats, which are often shot at bombed-out malls and airports, the lingering impact of the ongoing war always evident. Sometimes, the stunts lead to broken bones and concussions and, and in one harrowing moment, we briefly witness footage from a parkour stunt that goes fatally wrong. (Thankfully, the tragic end result is not shown.)

But while Zuaiter expresses her admiration for these feats, she never romanticises them or tries to imbue them with too much metaphorical significance. Rather, Yalla Parkour honours an unorthodox but cathartic coping mechanism for surviving injustice and armed conflict, and Zuaiter juxtaposes Matar’s sandblown images of a vibrant life with her placid shots of the snowy outdoors she sees from her window in America. 

At just under 90 minutes, the documentary does not build to any grand revelations or lead to shocking narrative twists. In their place are simple, unavoidable observations about the passage of the time and the challenge of trying to find contentment in an uncertain world. Matar grows older, but so too does Zuaiter, a mother herself, who witnesses this athlete confront some of the same difficult choices she once faced. The search for a better life means leaving behind not just a homeland but also loved ones who shaped you. And as any traceur knows, taking the leap can be both exhilarating and treacherous.