Children S Game

Marc is a different boy from the others. He just lost his best friend, the year that he started college. He lives in a society of internet, social networks and the desire of young people to be adult. He decides to question his emotions. In him, he discovers his fears of being an adult and leaving the childhood stage. He scares to grow up unlike the others. With the support of the memory of Oscar, in the middle of the city, between tears and laughter. Marc learns to let go, heal old memories, and redefine his emotions.

Kamilia is an eleven-year-old girl who's not afraid of anyone. One day, while playing football on the street, she suffers a traumatic experience, turning the street that used to be her playground into the arena for her struggles. The reality of life on the streets is harsh and cruel, and a random encounter can change your life forever. However, Kamilia is determined not to succumb to the darkness.

In a quiet film, where words are almost absent, Nabiha Lotfi films children from a village in Upper Egypt. They create their own toys with everyday objects and utensils.

Pavel has passionately fallen in love with 18-year-old Katya, a daughter of the horse stable owner, where he works as a vet. He constantly comes up with different ways to attract Katya's attention. However, his plans are shuttered by Alexei, whom Katya has found seriously wounded and in need of medical aid at the road side. Alexei's coming disrupts the usual course of life of the farm's inhabitants. Katya, a strange and extraordinary girl, falls in love with Alexei, who is seeking to escape from this queer place. Meanwhile, Katya's mother, Irina, is torn between her daughter and her love for Pavel. Passion, jealousy and hatred become intertwined in this love square.

On a wide, gravelly mountain road, earth-coloured dwellings in the background, small boys scamper behind tyres of different thickness and circumference, beating them onwards with a stick. A donkey brays in sympathy. The thin, flexible tyres of bicycles are the hardest to keep upright, especially when performing turns (slowing and tilting the rubber hoop without loss of momentum) before racing back, sometimes in competition with another, cheered on by their companions, towards the starting line.

An update of tag, the scariest of kids’ games. Instead of the touched person being “frozen,” they are contaminated and activated as viral transmitters. Boys and girls sport face coverings, any colour but red, the colour of contagion, worn by the first It. On catching someone the tagger shouts “Contagio!” and the victim echoes, “Contagiado!” Infected! while changing into a red mask (already glimpsed peeping from pockets, in fatalistic preparedness) to become It. The last child standing cries “Survivor!” In August 2021, 43 Mexican minors officially died of Covid; the true figure would be much higher. Tag was always about the menace of other people, but Contagio is brutally literal.

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 norteño song plays somewhere. A truck passes. The challenge is to get to the top of the hill by kicking the bottle steadily upwards, intercepting it as it rolls back, kicking it again, playing with and against gravity. The bottle drifts and dodges, zigs and zags, is briefly kidnapped by a dog. At the end, the Sisyphean stakes of the game become clear as the bottle gets away and with a groan the boy runs downhill after it.

The bay is peaceful, framed by low hills in the distance. Three boys stand thigh-deep in the brown water, trousers rolled up. The biggest, on the left, is proficient in the art of stone-skimming: sending flat pebbles spinning over the water in such a way that they bounce off the surface as many times as possible before sinking. The middle boy feeds him stones from a stockpile inside his t-shirt, while the smallest looks on laughing. The skimmer throws quickly, intently, without thinking, without assessing his stone. Some stones sink at the second bounce; some skip a long way. It’s all the same to him, he must keep throwing.

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 wall, that drops and rolls back on the pavement; the player whose coin remains the closest to the wall can keep the other players’ coins. As we watch, though, the coins tinkle everywhere, several flung by each player, further multiplied by their shadows, after which all three rush forward to scoop up loot, seemingly at random and yet without disagreements.

Close-up on shiny boots, knotted elastic, cobbles. Within the confines of a courtyard two demure little girls are playing a game of confinement, entrapment, escape. An elastic band has been stretched into a rectangle around four points –the legs of one girl and of a chair. At first the rectangle is positioned close to the ground. Silent with concentration, the girls take turns bracing the elastic and performing a prescribed sequence of jumps on and around the tensed bands. Ankles are entangled and then jump free. As the elastic rises higher, more and more of the body is involved in skilful contortions and athletic, perilous choreography. There’s no ultimate winning, just getting better at the dance.

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 shooting noises. A further dramatic element is the creative use of whatever lends itself in the vicinity –dustbins, trees, walls, abandoned cars– to improvise scenes inspired by war films and westerns, car chases and shootouts between gangs. The camerawork is rapid, swirling, full of jump cuts. A little girl sometimes raises her arms, in exasperation or surrender? Near the end, some half-hearted dying noises. Though the roles of victim and killer are pre-assigned, neither boy actually bites the dust.

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 sand forms a growing pile in the middle. Sea water starts to rise into the moat from below. As the waves break gently, closer and closer, the children dig faster to fortify the outer rampart with sodden sand. Even as the defences are being flooded, they work on shaping and firming the castle with hands and feet. The tide soon overwhelms the mini world and smooths the whole thing flat, leaving the children standing ankle-deep in ebb and flow.

This game requires considerable practice and precision, especially on the uneven terrain of an urban waste lot. The action consists in flicking a marble with thumb and index finger so that it reaches a hole in the ground in the fewest possible stages, ideally knocking away other marbles in its path. The player can keep any marble he has knocked out. If he doesn’t knock out any, he must wait his turn to try again, hoping another player won’t claim his marble in the meantime. Whoever collects the most wins. As the marbles tumble into the hollow, we see the players’ heads circularly reflected for a second in their tiny, polished spheres.

Girls and boys, together for once, hunt through lush grass and undergrowth, on the lookout for well-camouflaged grasshoppers. When one is found its hind legs are pulled off, though not its wings. Each child hurls his or her grasshopper up into the air, where it flutters against the sky above the upturned faces of the skipping, wheeling children. Unable to fly far, it will soon free-fall and be captured again. The winner is the player whose grasshopper stays the longest in the air.

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 and starts with the heavens or at least with the gusting wind because you don’t see his kite at first, and the string is so fine you can’t see that either. What you see is a body interacting with unknown forces, pulling to the left, the right, up, down, quick, over to the left again, and so on. Here is not only the body of the boy but the body of the world in deft mutual mimesis, amounting to ‘the mastery of non-mastery’ which is the greatest game of all: a guide, a goal, a strategy –all in one– for dealing with man’s domination of nature (including human nature). Afghan kite fighters often attach small blades to their kite strings, or coat them with ground glass and glue, the better to down their opponents’. Under the Taliban, kite-flying was banned.

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 garish Superman dangles between tall poles on a rope jerked by an adult, to make hitting harder. Each player is blindfolded and spun around several times before attempting to hit the piñata with a long stick. The kids’ wild swinging is directed by the shouts of friends, while the allotted time of each turn is counted down in a singsong about finding and losing one’s way. Fierce blows are dealt with varying accuracy until the piñata is fully smashed open and its sweets shower to the ground, leaped on by all the kids at once. The hollow, punctured figure is triumphantly dismembered.

Boys stampede through the shells of small geometric homes, fancy boxes falling to bits in a dry-grass wasteland like futuristic ruins. The players flatten themselves behind walls, peer cautiously with half an eye from glassless windows. Each boy holds a piece of broken mirror and aims at the enemy with the light refracted by the sun. They can’t resist making shooting noises, though these burning bullets are flashes from millions of miles away. Wandering dots of brilliance seek bodies out. Once a player is blinded by the light, he slumps and dies.

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. The player tosses a stone into the grid and starts hopping up one side of it to where the stone lies, careful to land only once in each square or station. When the stone is reached it must be kicked or nudged back down the other side to the start line, still hopping on the same foot. The test is difficult, and few succeed. For as the closing subtitles tell us: ‘In ancient cultures hopscotch symbolizes the progress of the soul from Earth to Heaven. The player hops between Worlds to escape Hell and reach Heaven, from which he will return to Earth reborn and redeemed.’

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 difficult. It involves a light bundle of leaves, as green and gathered as the school skirts of the players, that is repeatedly thrown up sideways with the outside or the inside of the foot while hopping on the other leg to a firm, fast beat: the girls look like carefree flappers dancing the Charleston. Part of the fun is counting aloud in English. One girl reaches 50. Then, with regretful backward looks, they vanish through the tall wooden portal into their school.

Knucklebones, or jacks, has existed for more than 2000 years and was first played with the astralagus bones of a sheep. This version –played with stones by two girls seated on the landing of a concrete stairway, people’s legs and occasional monkeys passing by– is close to the Korean Gonggi, with no separate ball. The turn begins by throwing a stone in the air and performing certain actions with the four others before catching it again. Later all are tossed up and received, at least some, on the back of the same hand. Pick-ups are sometimes between splayed fingers. The film blurs the logic of any sequence, dwelling on the leaping, clattering stones, and the agility of dusty hands.