• ‘The overarching theme of the film is belonging … I would love for people to understand that we cherish our identity as Palestinians, even though we come from different places in Palestine,’ Zuaiter tells Anadolu
• ‘Gaza used to be an open-air prison. Now it’s a graveyard. It’s a concentration camp,’ says Palestinian director

ISTANBUL

Areeb Zuaiter’s work has always circled questions of identity and memory, but her latest film reaches for something deeper: the feeling of belonging to a place you cannot freely touch.

For the Palestinian director, that contradiction – rooted, yet exiled; connected, yet cut off – defines not only her life, but the lives of millions of her compatriots.

“We are people who belong to this piece of land, but we are deprived of living in it,” Zuaiter told Anadolu, describing how Palestinians remain bound to their homeland even as Israel’s wars and occupation force them far from it. “No matter where we reside, we are deprived of a natural life in our own land.”

Zuaiter’s reflections came at the 13th Bosphorus Film Festival recently held in Istanbul, with a dedicated Palestinian cinema selection spotlighting films that confront memory, longing, erasure, and resilience.

Among them was Zuaiter’s new documentary, Yalla Parkour, a deeply personal journey shaped by her childhood memories of Gaza and the unexpected kinship she formed with the enclave’s young parkour athletes.

‘We cherish our identity as Palestinians’

Yalla Parkour unfolds across chapters that echo the layered Palestinian experience – fractured geographies, interrupted childhoods, and a constant negotiation of identity across borders.

Zuaiter, who now lives in the US, said the film examines what belonging means for Palestinians living both inside and outside Gaza, weaving together private memories and collective exile.

“The overarching theme of the film is belonging … I would love for people to understand that we cherish our identity as Palestinians, even though we come from different places in Palestine,” she said.

Her own story begins with a formative childhood encounter: visiting Gaza at age four, seeing the Mediterranean for the first time, and watching her mother’s smile brighten in the sea breeze.

That moment stayed with her. Years later, she stumbled across online footage of Gaza’s young men practicing parkour on the beach – flipping and sprinting against a backdrop of smoke and distant explosions of Israeli bombs.

The contrast was striking. Their joy was unbroken, even as the world around them trembled.

Compelled by the images, Zuaiter reached out to Ahmed, one of the athletes. Their conversations became the backbone of a film that traces Gaza’s shattered landscapes while elevating the creativity and courage of its youth.

Gaza is ‘a graveyard, a concentration camp’

Through her work with Ahmed and his team, Zuaiter sought to capture scenes of everyday perseverance: children vaulting over concrete blocks in a park, teenagers racing through battered streets, the ocean glistening even as drones buzz overhead.

“Children doing parkour in the middle of the park … they are enjoying despite Israeli bombings happening in the background,” she said. That moment, she explained, became the spark for the entire project – a testament to the unyielding spirit she sees in her people.

But filming Gaza’s vibrancy meant confronting Gaza’s trauma. As Israel waged its genocidal war, the production team suffered devastating losses.

“There was a really hard time during making the film, which is when Oct. 7 happened … We started losing crew members, we started losing parkour players,” she said. “We thought we can’t be disconnected from what’s going on. We need to address it.”

The film’s narrative evolved alongside the unfolding horrors. What began as a meditation on memory and movement transformed into an urgent documentation of survival.

“Cinema, and cinematic documentaries especially, they have a long lifespan,” Zuaiter said. For her, preserving the small, intimate truths of Gaza – a smile, a leap, a breath of salty air – is a political act.

The film also confronts the suffocation of Israel’s crippling siege. “Gaza used to be an open-air prison. Now it’s a graveyard. It’s a concentration camp,” she said.

As she struggled to capture Israel’s devastation of Gaza without losing its humanity, Zuaiter turned inward. To connect the personal and political, she reframed the entire documentary as a letter to her mother.

“My mother used to be very emotional whenever something happened in Gaza,” she said. “So, I thought it would be more of a letter to my mom.”