This is Tai Kwun Contemporary’s final screening of Francis Alÿs’s first feature film Sandlines (2018–20), produced in collaboration with the Iraq-based Ruya Foundation and Julien Devaux. Alÿs worked together with children from a small village in the Nineveh province of Iraq in enacting a century of Iraqi history—from the secret 1916 Sykes/Picot agreement between France and the UK, to the state of terror wielded by the Islamic State in 2016. The children were invited to revisit their past through a role play supported by modest props. This film has been selected for Sundance, International Film Festival of Rotterdam, FID Marseille, among others.
Still from Sandlines, the Story of History, Francis Alÿs