Francis Alÿs Movies

A 10-year-old boy in a pink salwar kameez stands near a dune-coloured wall under a powder-blue sky. He frowns and gesticulates, conversing in stops...

On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and...

Close-up on shiny boots, knotted elastic, cobbles. Within the confines of a courtyard two demure little girls are playing a game of confinement,...

For an indeterminate period of time, the magnetized metal collector takes a daily walk through the streets and gradually builds up a coat mad of any...

A traditional animation, hand-drawn in 500+ frames (which are also on display as part of the installation). The animation consists solely of a shoe...

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,...

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....

First we drive past harrowing scenes of missile and bullet damage, into an area that’s still intact. At a crossroads not far from the...

Each couple tries to save an orange from gravity. When it falls, the pair is eliminated. This exercise in collaboration involves intimacy: faces are...

Knucklebones, or jacks, has existed for more than 2000 years and was first played with the astralagus bones of a sheep. This version –played...

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

This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot. The action consists in flicking a...

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

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

“After about ten minutes the action comes to an abrupt end when Alÿs unthinkingly follows the bottle into the street and is hit by a...

The most basic sense of fun improvises on chance gifts of the environment. Snow-fun is too immediate to need rules, either. One game suggests...

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

Reminiscent of male football tricks where a ball is juggled frontally off the knee or foot, Chunggi, popular among Nepalese girls, appears a lot more...

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...