They glide elastically up shattered walls, balance on bombarded roofs, perform somersaults and pirouettes in the air, hop from wall to wall, run further, further and further to the beach and the dunes of the desert. They are the flying boys from the Gaza Strip who break out of their caged everyday life through acrobatics and free running.

“Parkour” is the name of her passion: the art of overcoming the limits set by the body and the environment. Constantly new obstacles spur them on to make ever more daring jumps. But in the Gaza Strip, parkour is also a reconquest of the politically closed and religiously occupied living space in which the moral guardians of Hamas ban modern art, dance and Western music. The fundamentalist Islamists also view parkour with suspicion as a fashion of the decadent West. “But we fly above siege and paternalism,” say the eleven boys. Parkour is her way of rebelling and defying everyone who wants to limit her life. “Parkour gives our lives meaning,” they say, “Parkour makes us proud, stronger, self-confident.” And it gives them the strength to dream, to dare to make new plans and to catapult themselves into another world – far above their claustrophobic everyday life in a tiny, overpopulated country, with a port where ships no longer dock and an airport , where planes no longer land; a country in a coma from which hardly anyone can get out and into which almost nothing can get in.

The film follows the boys from “Gaza Parkour” in their everyday lives in the poor, traditional south of the Gaza Strip. They talk about their feelings, doubts, tensions and conflicts with tradition, but also about their dreams for the future, longings and moments of happiness. The group almost disbanded when the two founders didn’t return from a trip to an Italian parkour competition a few weeks ago. But now the eleven boys have found each other again. With new motivation, they train every day on the gravestones and bullet-marked walls of the cemetery of their city, Khan Younis, so that they can finally perform in Gaza City – only 30 kilometers away, and yet for them as far as Europe.

Director: Carmen Butta
Script: Carmen Butta
Camera: John Toft
Editing: Michelle Barbin
Sound: Mohamed Al Sosi, Munes Abu Nahel
Editorial Staff: Linde Dehner
Production: Gunter Hanfgarn
Stations: ZDF/ARTE

Nomination, Human Rights Film Prize, 2014