About the film

An insightful and troubling film about race, ethics andmanipulation, Ruben Östlund’s „Play” is based on an actual incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in which a group of black kids manipulated white and Asian teenagers into surrendering their valuables. In „Play”, Yannick (Yannick Diakité) and his friends target a trio of younger, presumably wealthier kids, two of them from „traditional” Swedish backgrounds and one whose family immigrated from Asia. Yannick and his pals claim that one of the boys stole a friend’s phone. (It’s the kind of claim only a teenager would put any credence in.) Eventually, they lure their targets outside the city, where they construct an elaborate ruse to relieve them of their belongings. Filmed entirely in long shots, „Play” is chilling in its ambiguity. The distance between the viewer and the action happening in the image invests the film with an ominous impenetrability, exacerbated by inchoate assumptions and suspicions about race.