Francis Alÿs Movies

Cuban children have always built chivichanas for racing, using any wood to hand and ball bearings for wheels. During the hardship of the early 1990s,...

The castle must be positioned just far enough from the sea to be completed before the tide reaches it. As the moat is dug by busy spades, the vacated...

The children of a mountain village near Mosul re-enact a century of Iraqi history, from the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 to the realm of...

Once upon a time Ani was one of the most important cities of the Middle Ages. People started abandoning the city until all life left and silence fell...

A red VW Beetle drives up a hill, an image which is accompanied by a loud soundtrack of a brass band's rehearsal. The driver is listening to a...

Why do all the bottle tops start the same way up, grouped together, if there are two teams? When is the ball launched with a plank and when by hand?...

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

The props in this game are wooden sticks or branches shaped like guns. Two kids pretend to fire at each other, making elaborate and highly varied...

Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins. The players...

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....

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

In August 2017, during the final phase of the Fatah (Conquest) Operation, the Iraqi Army pushed Islamic State combatants back from the east bank of...

1998, 00:27:42

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

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,...

1998, 00:27:43

This ancient Chinese game is played between two people, who in unison say ‘rock, paper, scissors’ before ‘throwing’ one of...

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...

The game is filmed from above in a single take, emphasizing the inexorable process of subtraction. Six children place five chairs in a row, facing in...