Francis Alÿs Movies

Girls and boys, together for once, hunt through lush grass and undergrowth, on the lookout for well-camouflaged grasshoppers. When one is found its...

Snail racing is a game of unequal chances, especially when your snails are not trained champions, but randomly plucked off a wall; individual...

Over the city of Lubumbashi looms the mampala or slag heap of the Étoile du Congo cobalt mine, its lower slopes today sifted by the...

We see three kids from behind, standing at a set distance from a peeling, whitewashed wall. The rule is that each player throws a coin against the...

High above the city that shimmers like a distant sea, a boy kicks a plastic bottle half full of liquid up a steep shanty road of light and dark. A...

A piñata is a papier-mâché figure stuffed with sweets. Common at birthdays in urban patios, here we find it in a field, where a...

In The Green Line, for which the axiom was ‘sometimes the political is poetic, sometimes the poetic is political’, Alÿs walks...

A sprite in a blue pinafore, plimsolls, and white facemask flits through Hong Kong, enclosed in a quicksilver bubble of magic. Streets become the...

Che Ling means “pull bell sound”. This ancient Chinese juggling is a form of yoyo, once popular in Europe as “diabolo”. Two...

Born in the recent past in school playgrounds and now a national sport, Nzango is a female-only game. The aim is to imitate, or more mysteriously,...

Many of us played this as kids, spinning on the spot until collapsing. In a group there’s a competitive element, each tries to be the last one...

Kisolo is one of a thousand variants of the global Ur-game, Mancala, a “sowing” game sometimes still played with seeds even when using a...

An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being “frozen,” they are contaminated and activated as...

Ordinary bottle tops, once flattened, threaded and tensed for spinning, become as sharp as gladiator swords. It’s edge against thrumming edge...

The name of the game comes from the Spanish “tenedor,” fork, but its other name, “Come fango, Eat Mud,” seems more apt as we...

Politics of Rehearsal (2005) Focuses on the theme of rehearsal, which is so characteristic of Belgian-born, Mexico City-based Francis...

Outside a stark tent city, this version of the game involves a grid of squares, two across by six long, marked by lines gouged into the arid ground....

Stark though it is, the roof terrace with its low ochre-red wall and washed turquoise abstract seems the nearest thing to a garden among the...