They glide up bullet-hole-riddled walls, balance on bombed-out roofs, perform flips and pirouettes in mid-air, leap from wall to wall, run onwards, always onwards, to the beach and to the desert dunes. They are the flying boys of the Gaza Strip, using acrobatics and freerunning to break away from their trapped everyday lives.

Parkour is the name of their passion: the art of overcoming the boundaries set by body and environment. New obstacles spur them on to more and more daring leaps. But in the Gaza Strip, parkour is also a way of recapturing a living space that has been politically sealed off and occupied by religion, in which the moral guardians of Hamas have banned modern art, dance and Western music. Parkour, too, is warily viewed by the Islamic fundamentalists as a decadent Western trend. “But we fly over any and all forms of siege and paternalization,” say the eleven boys. Parkour is their way of rebelling and defying all those who would set boundaries on their lives. “Parkour gives our lives meaning,” they say, “parkour makes us proud, strong, confident.” And it gives them the strength to dream, to draw up new plans and catapult themselves into a new world – high above their claustrophobic daily lives in a tiny, overpopulated country with a harbor at which no ships dock, an airport at which no airplanes land; a country in a coma, which almost nobody can leave and into which almost nothing arrives.

The film follows the “Gaza Parkour” boys through their lives in the poor, traditionalistic south of the Gaza Strip. They tell about their feelings, doubts, tensions and conflicts with this tradition, but also about their dreams for the future, their desires and moments of happiness. The group threatened to fall apart when the two founders did not return from a journey to a parkour competition in Italy. But since then the eleven boys have found each other again. With fresh motivation, they train daily amid the gravestones and shot-up walls of the cemetery in their city, Khan Younis. Their hope is to perform in Gaza City – just 30 kilometers away, and yet for them, as distant as Europe.

Director: Carmen Butta
Writer: Carmen Butta
Cinematographer: John Toft
Editor: Michelle Barbin
Sound: Mohamed Al Sosi, Munes Abu Nahel
Commissioning editor: Linde Dehner
Producer: Gunter Hanfgarn
Channel: ZDF/ARTE

– Nomination, Human Rights Film Prize, 2014