‘Yalla Parkour’: Red Sea Review

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

A Palestinian director residing in America however searching for a connection together with her homeland finds one unexpectedly in Yalla Parkour, a private documentary about her rising bond with a Gazan parkour athlete. Areeb Zuaiter narrates the movie as a direct tackle to her deceased mom, detailing her emotional isolation whereas expounding on a virtually 10-year friendship with Ahmed Matar, a younger man who data balletic stunts across the wartorn area. The filmmaker finds magnificence and freedomIn in Matar’s typically nerve-wracking feats — to not point out a refusal to succumb to the horrors of the Israeli occupation.

An exceedingly mild movie with an nearly diaristic high quality

The ensuing movie, which has its MENA premiere at Crimson Sea after profitable Doc NYC’s Finest Worldwide Documentary award, affords a extra muted, however nonetheless affecting, approach of processing the continued Israeli-Palestinian battle. The emphasis is on Zuaiter’s exchanges with Matar, in addition to his arresting parkour footage, and the bittersweet, introspective tone ought to make this an interesting competition providing.

Zuaiter found Matar in 2015 whereas being captivated by on-line movies of parkour athletes — also referred to as traceurs — performing in Gaza. Though Zuaiter has lived within the US for years, Matar’s YouTube clips stir in her a craving for her Palestinian roots. (Her household lived within the West Financial institution metropolis of Nablus, roughly 100 km from Gaza.) Lacking residence and likewise her late mom, Zuaiter strikes up a long-distance friendship with this athlete, who desires to flee a Palestine the place he feels he has no future.

Regardless of the doubtless incendiary political subject material, that is an exceedingly mild movie with an nearly diaristic high quality. Zuaiter’s narration is an intimate, ongoing dialog together with her late mom as she shares her takeaways from attending to know Matar. (The documentary, Zuaiter’s first at characteristic size, is thematically linked to her 2019 non-fiction brief Colours Of Resistance, which celebrated Palestinian artists corresponding to painters and poets whereas analyzing her sophisticated relationship together with her origins.) 

Zuaiter shows affection for this younger traceur, whose life is central to the documentary’s meditation on existential dislocation. Over the course of practically a decade, Matar turns into an grownup: his need for a recent begin strikes from being an idle dream to taking tangible motion. A few of his pals have already left Palestine by changing into skilled parkour athletes or coaches, and he aspires to do the identical. His ambition is flippantly ironic to Zuaiter, who additionally longed to flee her homeland, solely to finally mourn its absence. 

Yalla Parkour options a number of of Matar’s parkour stunts, which contain harmful backflips off dunes, hurtling from one construction to a different and defying gravity by dangling off the sting of a tall constructing. (Zuaiter and Matar initially discover frequent floor over their shared ardour for filmmaking, with Matar liable for a lot of the documentary’s parkour footage.) There’s a poignancy to those athletic feats, which are sometimes shot at bombed-out malls and airports, the lingering affect of the continued warfare at all times evident. Typically, the stunts result in damaged bones and concussions and, and in a single harrowing second, we briefly witness footage from a parkour stunt that goes fatally fallacious. (Fortunately, the tragic finish end result is just not proven.)

However whereas Zuaiter expresses her admiration for these feats, she by no means romanticises them or tries to imbue them with an excessive amount of metaphorical significance. Somewhat, Yalla Parkour honours an unorthodox however cathartic coping mechanism for surviving injustice and armed battle, and Zuaiter juxtaposes Matar’s sandblown photos of a vibrant life together with her placid photographs of the snowy outside she sees from her window in America. 

At slightly below 90 minutes, the documentary doesn’t construct to any grand revelations or result in surprising narrative twists. Of their place are easy, unavoidable observations concerning the passage of the time and the problem of looking for contentment in an unsure world. Matar grows older, however so too does Zuaiter, a mom herself, who witnesses this athlete confront a few of the similar tough decisions she as soon as confronted. The seek for a greater life means forsaking not only a homeland but additionally family members who formed you. And as any traceur is aware of, taking the leap may be each exhilarating and treacherous.