Nestled on a quiet street a stone’s throw away from the bustle of Paris’ fifth arrondissement, La Clef cinema, one of the city’s most enduring rep houses, has been saved from closure following a five-year battle involving lawyers, developers, and government officials.
Cinéma Revival, the activist group behind the campaign to save the venue, has purchased the cinema building, which had been put on the market by its previous owner, Caisse d’Epargne banking group. The group bought the building with €2 million raised through an online fundraising campaign. €400,000 was raised from 5000 individual donations with contributors including filmmakers and actors such as David Lynch, Wang Bing, Leos Carax, Céline Sciamma, Sophie Fillières, Agnès Jaoui, and Irène Jacob.
The remaining cash was raised through a series of what the group described to us as “major” cash donations from Pulp Fiction filmmaker Quentin Tarantino and two other anonymous patrons who have asked to remain anonymous. The group plans to reopen the cinema for four days from June 27 to 30 before closing for one year to renovate the decades-old building. A bar will be installed onsite alongside three film post-production rooms, which will be run for profit to support the cinema operations. The Cinéma Revival fund will employ two full-time staffers to run the public-facing for-hire business while all cinema programming will continue to be conducted by volunteers.
“The cinema remains community-run, relying on volunteers with complete political, cultural, and economic autonomy, the group told us this week during a video interview conducted onsite at the cinema, which is currently undergoing minor renovations.
“The fund owns the building but it has no say in how the cinema is run. We have created a structure that has no shareholders, so the people who gave us money have no say in how the cinema is run. That’s how we preserve the independence of the cinema.”
Tarantino’s donation was the result of an impromptu meeting with two members of the La Clef collective at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. The Jackie Brown filmmaker had been in town to promote his book Cinema Speculation and host a screening of John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder.
“He was really interested in the project and then sent us a mysterious email saying ‘How much do you need to get the cinema?’,” the group told us.
“The subject of the email was: ‘This is Quentin Tarantino.’ And then at the end, it said, ‘sent from my iPad.’ He asked how much we needed and then covered it all. That allowed us to complete the financing.”
Tarantino has been a long-standing public supporter of physical cinema spaces. The filmmaker owns two cinemas in Los Angeles. He bought the embattled New Beverly Cinema in 2014 and the Vista Theatre on Sunset Boulevard in 2021.
The first screening back at La Clef on June 27 will be Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7. The seminal New Wave classic had been the film scheduled to screen in 2018 when bailiffs first entered the cinema to shut down operations. The screening will be presented by Agnes’ daughter, Rosalie Varda. The group told us future programming will prioritize progressive and militant world cinemas.
Billed as one of the French capital’s sole surviving community cinemas, La Clef is at the heart of Paris’s Left Bank fifth arrondissement, once associated with student activism and intellectual and political ferment. When the La Clef building was officially closed in 2019, a collective of moviegoers, film professionals, academics, artists, and local residents began an occupation of the building, hosting continuous daily screenings and talks in the cinema with guests including Leos Carax, Frederick Wiseman, Céline Sciamma, and Adèle Haenel. The building’s owner sued and the activists were hit with a 350 euros daily fine, which was later repealed by a local court. Legendary Killers Of The Flower Moon filmmaker Martin Scorsese even penned an open letter in support of the movement.
The La Clef collective has launched a separate fundraising round to aid with the building renovations. They need €300,000 to complete the work. But with the cinema’s immediate future somewhat cemented, the group is looking to spread their momentum across the city.
“Many cinemas in Paris are closing or are at risk of closing, so it’s still an ongoing fight. But I hope other collectives will use that example and use our example of a victorious struggle to find their own way to defend places that are under threat,” they told us.
“Given that we’ve made it I’m quite confident that this will be a space to invent new ways of programming, making, and discussing films.”
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