Everyday life in Gaza, pre-invasion, is vividly rememembered in “Yalla Parkour,” a documentary largely compiled from the climbing, backflipping and tumbling stunts of the Gaza Parkour Team, who captured their exploits on camera.

We see young Palestinian Arabs finding joy in a place of perpetual “death and destruction,” where Israeli reprisals and blunt oppression, occupation and violence were a miserable way of life and death long before the Oct. 7, 2023 lashout attacks on Israel, used as Israeli justification for the current slaughter, starvation and “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza.

The French-invented sport of “parkour” is this group’s means of escape. They practice their flips and backflips, beam-walking, clamboring and climbing among the ruins of this “war” or that one — a gutted, unfinished mall, an airport that never saw a take-off or landing, piles of concrete and rebar with only the sand surrounding them as a cushion should this latest climb or stunt go wrong.

They are “experts in turning pain into happiness,” Palestinian ex-pat filmmaker Areeb Zuaiter narrates from her Washington, D.C. home. She sampled years of clips of practicing stunts and actual stunts into her film, using a voice-over-narrated letter to her long-dead mother back in Nablus as the finished movie’s framework.

That hoary and sentimental framing device works against the movie’s impact, which is basically a story of young men taking risks with life and limb just to make attention-grabbing videos that will get them noticed and be their ticket out.

Zuaiter meets Ahmed Matar by phone, and their lengthy phone conversations over the better part of a decade tell the story of the Gaza Parkour Team — those who “got out,” those who wound up in the hospital, those who died (stay through the closing credits to see a shocking list of film crew and parkour athletes killed by Israeli violence) and Ahmed himself.

Ahmed longs to tour with the team, to get out at the invitation of people from outside countries, and battles endless red tape and near deliberate inefficiency as that “trip” — which could be one-way — is delayed again and again.

“There is no future in Gaza,” he says (in Arabic with English subtitles), stating the obvious.

In the early years of their phone calls, Zuaiter complains of her “outsider” status now, wishing she could return to her “magical place.” But the enormous risks of such a trip, even in the less conflict-torn intervals, kept her from seeing her late mother onele time and keep her from risking her status as an immigrant. Fear of being trapped back in a war-torn place with “no future” runs through the entire Palestinian diaspora.

But Matar’s footage from the early to mid 2010s captures the “beauty” of the beaches, neighborhoods and landscaped building developments. Endless conflict, periodic bombings and Israeli raids notwithstanding, those neighborhoods were teeming with life.

When Jinji, a ginger-headed Palestinian parkour climber gets badly injured in a fall, neighborhood life stops to get him help. And when he’s released from the hospital, he’s practically given a parade.

The parkour stunts that go wrong are more revealing than the underwhelming (by movie parkour standards) stunts they pull off. Painful, wind-knocked out or concussed “practice” is what it takes to learn these moves without helmets, safety nets or adult supervision.

Some will get out, some will stay and many will die when the vast escalation in violence of 2023 begins.

“Yalla Parkour” is most effective in showing us violence that has been visited upon these people for decades and the “toughness” it takes to survive and escape and even relocate to a place of relative safety and comfort.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Ahmed Matar, Areeb Zuaiter

Credits: Directed by Areeb Zuaiter, scripted by Areeb Zuaiter, Phil Jandaly and Johan Simonsson. A Kinana Films production

Running time: 1:30