BREAK THE WALL

Red Star invited us to create a free-form film to announce their new jersey — the result of a collaboration between Kappa and the visual artist Tom Ducarouge — and to express the deeper identity of the club. We were given total creative freedom, with one simple mission: tell the story of Red Star, not just through football, but through feeling.

The Jersey
In 2024, Red Star made a bold decision: to demolish their historic concrete stand at Bauer and rebuild it. As a tribute to this architectural icon, artist Tom Ducarouge — a long-time Red Star supporter — imagined a jersey that would carry its memory.

He designed a textured pattern inspired by raw concrete, overlaid with the club’s iconic green and red tones. The result is a shirt that is both minimal and sophisticated — a quiet ode to brutalism, and to the unique place that football, memory, and architecture hold in Saint-Ouen.

The idea for the film was born from the jersey itself — from this concept of concrete. A solid, silent material that holds stories and memories. From that came the image of a child alone, playing ball against a wall — faire un mur, as we say in French.

It’s a universal gesture. A rhythm. A memory almost everyone shares. It echoes like a Proustian madeleine — that lonely ball bouncing back endlessly, the pulse of childhood, of ambition, of dreaming alone.

Our film follows this boy — played by Azer, a young Red Star academy player — as he trains alone at the foot of his building. With every strike, every rebound, his determination grows. Until the wall begins to crack. Then collapse.

The act becomes symbolic: breaking through the wall becomes breaking through one’s limits, one’s social circumstances. A poetic metaphor for what Red Star represents — resistance, self-improvement, and belief in the impossible.

We shot the film in the Planète Z complex, at the foot of the real Bauer Stadium. The wall was real. We built it, and destroyed it using a custom-built cannon and a weighted football.

The cinematography draws from black-and-white photography and architectural imagery. Concrete is omnipresent. Time dilates. The camera moves slowly, then accelerates. Every detail — dust, shadows, rhythm — becomes a visual pulse.

The sound design follows the same philosophy. Built around the repetitive beat of the bouncing ball, the score evolves like free jazz — drums, delay, echo, improvisation — recorded live on the edit.