Francis Alÿs Movies

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

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...

Grandma’s Footsteps in Britain, Red light, green light in North America, Thunder, weather, lightning in Austria, One, two, three, ciggy...

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

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...

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...

1998, 00:27:42

1998, 00:27:43

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

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

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

Each person’s action affects everybody. This fine principle of teamwork applies even when individuals are pulling in different directions....

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...

A guitar, a bacalao and a teddy bear dangle at the top of a wooden pole. The mast is slickened with grease. A group of teenagers gather. Strength and...

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...

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

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

Alÿs’s motto for When Faith Moves Mountains is “Maximum effort, minimum result.” For this epic project the artist invited five...