DOC NYC 2019 “Hurdle” (Wendy Moscow)

November 11, 2019.  There are many heartbreaking moments in the new documentary “Hurdle” that give the viewer a visceral sense of what it’s like to live under 50 years of military occupation, but the one that lingers indelibly in my mind’s eye is the moment when Israeli soldiers begin lobbing percussion grenades at little Palestinian boys and youth proudly displaying their home-made kites for the camera. Watching their joy turn to fear as they flee the smoke and deafening explosions gave me a visceral sense of how traumatic it must be for young children who must live daily with the seeming arbitrariness of state violence.

Director Michael Rowley has chosen to illuminate an aspect of the Isreali/Palestinian conflict that we rarely see – the everyday lives of young people behind the border wall. He profiles, in particular, two young men who, in very different ways, strive to impart hope and self-worth to other young people languishing under the rule of a government that demonizes them, limits their opportunities, and forces them to leave their ancestral homes as Palestinian land continues to be confiscated to build Israeli settlements.

Sami, 24, learned about the athletic jumping sport called “parkour” from YouTube videos. He founded the Jerusalem Parkour Team in Occupied East Jerusalem, teaching the team members to leap, tumble and climb, honing their gymnastic prowess in the shadow of the insurmountable border wall, which itself becomes a character in the film. Despite the bleak setting, Rowley’s camerawork is breathtakingly beautiful in these parkour sequences. He often shoots the athletes from below and in slow motion, giving them the appearance of flying through their environment as they jump from one obstacle to the next. Of course, the metaphor is inescapable.

Mohammad is a 26-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and filmmaker who has lived in the Aida Refugee Camp in the Occupied West Bank his entire life. In his capacity as director of the media unit in the camp, he teaches young people to film and photograph their lives. He urges them to show the world, through their work, who they are – boosting their self-esteem and giving them the opportunity to create a narrative that gives them some dignity in a world where they’ve been dehumanized and ignored. In one of my favorite sequences in the film, we see the stark and striking black and white images created by the children in Mohammad’s class – images that speak of the desire for freedom, but speak to us aesthetically as well.

These young men are no strangers to state violence. For having had the audacity to put his camera to his eye during a raid by the Israeli military, Mohammad was shot with a rubber bullet which shattered all the bones in his face. One of Sami’s team members, Moussab, was shot with a live round during a protest. The anger is real, but so is the yearning for peace, as indicated by much of the graffiti on the border wall – an exuberant canvas on which feelings and ideas are expressed in a many-layered collage of complexity.

It is in the quotidian moments of the subjects lives that the film really shines – for example, parkour team members praying before beginning their parkour practice, and gently putting an insect outside, rather than kill it. Ultimately, it is this recognition of our common humanity that enables us to connect across political boundaries and border walls.

“Hurdle” will be screened as part of the DOC NYC Film Festival on Wednesday, November 13 at 9:30 pm, IFC Center, 323 6th Ave. For more info, visit DOCNYC.net