The Resene Architecture and Design Film Festival began on the 9th of May in Auckland and runs until the 22nd, picking back up in Wellington on the May 25th - June 5th and finishing in Dunedin from June 6th - 9th.

Screening for the first time in New Zealand is a Danish film called My Playground (see the trailer below). The film is screening at Rialto cinemas in Auckland on May 14th/16th, so if you don't want to miss out, get your tickets ASAP. Screening dates for Wellington and Dunedin are not available yet.

Synopsis:

"MY PLAYGROUND explores the way parkour and freerunning is changing the perception of urban space and how the spaces and buildings they are moving on are changing them. Mainly set in Copenhagen the film follows Team JiYo as they explore the city and encounter the obstacles it presents.
Award winning architect Bjarke Ingels, founder of BIG Architects, is fascinated by the way Team JiYo convey architecture and takes the team to his buildings, to explore and unfold their skills, that may be just as ground breaking as the architecture itself. The film travels around the world from Denmark to Japan, United States, United Kingdom, and China to explore where the urban mobility is heading. Team JiYo has a dream of making the biggest dedicated parkour park in the world, but isn’t parkour and freerunning supposed to be in the city and not in a fixed environment?

Kaspar Astrup Schröder set out to more closely examine the way that traceurs interact with architecture - honing in on parkour and urban mobilty in modern cities spaces via Team JiYo and the people that determine how the space is shaped within our cities."

Trailer:

This week, a research article by our very own Damien Puddle has been published in the Journal of Science and Sports Medicine.

Ground reaction forces and loading rates associated with parkour and traditional drop landing techniques is available online and in pdf. It's free for you to access and spread around as much as you want!

If you haven't got the time to read it or you're not quite clued up on the technical jargon, the gist of the results are that parkour practitioners who have been training for two or more years have significantly reduced impact forces when landing in precision and roll landings compared to traditional toe-heel landings. Also, the impact forces they sustain in the parkour landings are significantly lower than the preferred landings (often a traditional toe-heel landings) of amateur and professional sports people in other studies (including gymnasts, volleyball and basketball players).

Damien would like to thank Peter Maulder and Wintec for the support and encouragement while conducting the study and to the NZ parkour community for participating in the research.

Damien's honours research looking at the impact forces between the precision and roll landing from varying heights will be submitted for publication this year.

The second NZPA newsletter hit inbox's last night! It's full exciting things for the future that may interest you.

If you're not on our mailing list you can view the newsletter here, and if you missed the first one, it's here.

We'll continue to make them available online, but if you'd like to get them straight to your inbox you can give us your email and you'll be sure to have the next one delivered personally. You can post it here or email us at contact@nzparkour.co.nz

We have signed up with a new email client and are going to be sending out semi-regular newsletters informing you of updates, events, new initiatives and other local and national developments. The first of these (coming to you on November 1st) will have a focus towards some large internal structure changes happening to the NZPA and what that means for you.

If you want to stay in the loop, drop us a line at contact@nzparkour.co.nz with your contact email or post it in reply to this thread.

- The NZPA

We realise that the news page hasn't been updated in a little while, but things are ticking over behind the scenes here at the NZPA. There are some rather large projects being worked on which will bring a shift in focus for the NZPA and hopefully open a lot of doors that will allow the parkour community NZ to thrive.
Most of the visible forward momentum is happening within each individual community and there's definitely things to be proud and excited about.

Some upcoming events that are worth attending:

WangFest
HamJam

In the mean time, we'd like to direct your attention to the video below. Charles does a fine job at articulating some of the key things that the public should know about parkour.