Hot Docs 2025 - Yalla Parkour Review

 

Yalla Parkour is at its strongest and most exhilarating when debut director Areeb Zuaiter simply plays footage that the children of Gaza have been sharing with her. These clips feature profound and adrenaline-pumping physical achievements, but they’re not afraid to show moments of great tension and peril either. The best example of this is represented by a five-story building with small square-shaped ledges which the film’s main subjects (young children across gaza, from tweens to teenagers) climb more than once throughout the film. As you can imagine, these cell-phone shot scenes — which Zuaiter show raw throughout the film, exactly as they were recorded— got the audience of my screening very involved, spawning studio-audience-adjacent   reactions in moments (but honestly? It’s deservedly so. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend more than one moment biting my nails in worry and anticipation.

Ahmed Matar is one of the boys from Garza who is apart of the parkour group. He talks to Zuaiter, providing her footage of the group’s latest stunts while commentating over them. Through this footage and Ahmed’s commentary, the audience becomes increasingly familiar with the circumstances they have to face everyday. It’s clear that Zuaiter didn’t receive the idea for this film as a spur-of-the-moment lightbulb; it’s clear that this is a deeply personal and meaningful piece to her. Matar and Zuaiter’s conversations play out between Zuaiter’s individual narration - where she reflects upon her childhood (which is what connected her with Matar in the first place), domestic relationships, as well as contemporary state of the place she grew up - which gives the documentary a very tight sense of fiction-like-narrative pacing via its A and B stories.

All of its stories see themselves getting wrapped up in a fulfilling and exciting way (which I won’t spoil, don’t worry), and this credit can be handed towards Zuaiter creating such a narratively-tight and well-structured environment within her documentary. Arcs are established and achieved in such a way that you would assume this was a fictional narrative from an incredibly talented writing team, if it wasn’t so real.

Hot Docs 2025 runs until tomorrow, May 4th. Tickets can be purchased at hotdocs.ca.