CROIS PAS QU’ON DORT PRODUCTION
WORDS KATIE KASPERSON
Co-directed by Nick Walters and Lou Marillier, Nike -backed Crois Pas Qu’on Dort captures the highs and lows of sport through the eyes of three French athletes
F ilmed over five years, Crois Pas Qu’on Dort captures the real, raw experiences of three French athletes – Maysane and Leyna Kamkasoumphou and Charles-Antoine Kouakou – in the lead-up to the 2024 Olympics and Paralympics. With support from Nike, the doc was pitched as “a film that would inspire a new generation to become excited about sport,” according to Alex Bennet-Grant, founder of creative agency We Are Pi and subdivision Pi Studios. “Nike wanted different ways to tell athlete stories and was looking at long-form content.” When Paris was announced as host of the 2024 Games, Bennet-Grant nabbed the opportunity. “Casting lasted about ten months,” begin co-directors Nick Walters and Lou Marillier, who were searching for ‘a high level of sporting ability and an ambition to reach Paris 2024’, as well as ‘a richness we felt had the potential to offer a moving story’. After settling on Kouakou and the Kamkasoumphou twins, the pair stressed to their families and coaches that filming would be full-on. “Having a large camera two feet from your face isn’t a natural experience,” they suggest. “From the beginning, we were amazed by how comfortable everyone seemed,” as they’d wanted the cameras to stay invisible. They limited their crew to under ten people for a typical shoot to maintain fluidity, alternating between a 5K RED GEMINI and 6K RED KOMODO, both with SIGMA prime lenses. Walters generally operated the cameras himself.
IN THE SPORTING SPOTLIGHT Gold medal-winning Kouakou (above) had natural screen presence
When they first began filming Crois Pas Qu’on Dort , “it was like deep-sea fishing,” Walters and Marillier describe. “We’d be hauling in bundles of footage, dissecting it, assessing all the narrative avenues. As we moved through the years, we knew what we could discard and instinctively pursued what felt the strongest, authentically and dramatically. By the end, we knew exactly what scenes we wanted to film and how to use them.” The pandemic hit during the five-year filming schedule, and France went into lockdown, temporarily halting production. The directors offered a quick fix, sending each athlete their own video camera to continue documenting their daily lives, despite the social distance. “We had no
idea when we would be able to go into production again,” they recall, though they were up and running again by July – ‘albeit sporadically’. The story came to a natural end when the twins were not invited to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics and Kouakou – who had previously won gold in the Tokyo Paralympics – didn’t place. Despite these setbacks, the documentary upholds its central message of grit and perseverance – in English, the title translates to ‘don’t think we’re sleeping’. The film premiered in January 2025 at Le Grand Rex in Paris and has since enjoyed a limited cinema run across France. International release dates have yet to be announced
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