Two years after being evicted by Paris police, a collective of students and film-industry professionals returned to the arthouse cinema they had occupied from 2019 to 2022 on Thursday to reinstall the wheels of a 35mm projector.
The crucial difference is that this time they did so as legal owners of the keys to the 600 sq metre community cinema in the French capital’s Latin quarter, appropriately called La Clef (The Key).
Having failed to prevent the venue’s closure by squatting alone, members of the Cinema Revival collective launched a fundraising campaign that managed to collect €370,000 (£313,000) from 3,000 donors, as well as donations from prominent cinephiles including the French film director Leos Carax, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.
After securing further bank loans and successfully renegotiating the sale price, the collective this week announced that they had bought the screening rooms on Rue Daubenton, in Paris’s 5th arrondissement, for €2.7m.
Next Thursday, La Clef will reopen for a four-day victory lap of screenings, before closing for a year of refurbishment works.
“It felt like the right thing to do because otherwise La Clef would have turned into a commercial cinema or a supermarket”, said Clotilde Bonan, a 28-year-old student member of the collective. “It was impossible for us not to act.”
Paris, the birthplace of cinema, is thought to have the highest density of film theatres in the world, with 49 currently designated as subsidised art et essai, or arthouse, cinemas. Yet even in this environment La Clef has stood out, as the capital’s last remaining cinéma associatif, or volunteer-run venue.
La Clef was founded in 1973 by Claude Franck-Forter, who used its primetime screening slots as a forum for promising new film-making talent and showed French New Wave classics after midnight.
When the rise of home television disrupted the cinema industry in the 1980s, Franck-Forter sold his venue to the local chapter of the French cooperative bank Caisse d’Epargne, but its influence grew nonetheless. Under the curating hand of the west African film-maker Sanvi Panou in the 1990s, Le Clef became Paris’ foremost venue for cinema from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
But when the owners decided to sell in 2015, the cinema, named after the adjacent Rue de la Clef, looked certain to go the same way as many of the iconic film palaces on the Champs-Élysées, where the George V, the Gaumont Marignan and the UGC Normandie have all permanently closed down in recent years.
The 50 students, local residents and film-makers who swooped into La Clef to illegally occupy its premises in September 2019 thought differently. A shift system was put into place to ensure people were physically present inside the building 24 hours a day.
Film remained central to the venue’s mission even under occupation. On its first night, the collective put on a free screening of Marvin J Chomsky’s 1980 film Attica, about the Attica prison riot. During the pandemic, films were projected on to the building’s walls for locked-down neighbouring residents.
“La Clef was full of young people being creative, discussing film and politics, almost like something out of a novel,” said Fernando Ganzo, an associate editor of film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. “The atmosphere was electrifying. If you look at what cinemas in many cities in the world have become, it’s hard to find a place with this kind of energy.”
Simon Thomas, 30, who knew the cinema only as a spectator before joining the collective in 2019, said: “Our aim is not to compete with commercial cinemas but to show films that cannot be screened within another economic model. Even small arthouse cinemas function under some commercial pressure. As a volunteer film theatre, we can show films only because we like them.”
During the reopening from 27 to 30 June, several of the 20 films in the programme will be personally introduced by film-makers who have supported the collective over the past five years, including the Oscar-winning director Justine Triet (Anatomy of a Fall), Céline Sciamma (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) and the producer Rosalie Varda, who will introduce a screening of her mother Agnes Varda’s film Cléo from 5 to 7.
Fundraising efforts will continue from July, since the collective remains at least €300,000 short of the funds required to do the fire-safety and asbestos-removal works that would allow the venue to legally reopen next year.
To guarantee La Clef’s existence in the long term, there will be a new cafe and cutting rooms that can be rented out to young film producers, though the venue will remain volunteer-run and tickets to its 120- and 60-seat screening rooms continue to be sold on a pay-what-you-wish basis.
The aim, the collective’s members said, was to protect La Clef from market forces in perpetuity.
“We are now the owners, but we’ve removed all the rights that an owner has, such as the ability of shareholders to sell their shares in the future,” said Pauline Delfino, 24. “There’s no single owner of La Clef. We all have the keys now.”
